


The Budapest Gambit

by Chronolith



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alchemy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Alternate Universe - Victorian, F/M, Historical Inaccuracy, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Murder Mystery, POV Multiple, england without the colonialism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2020-02-27 00:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18728434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: “You!” Shiro sighs as Bandor Chabert eels his way out of the grip of one of the waiters. The boy is filthy and smells like a bog. “Mr. Holt says you’re to come right away.”“Does he.”Keith’s laughing quietly behind him in a manner that Shiro finds frankly insulting.“He’s at the river’s edge—” a singularly unhelpful location as the Thames has a lot of edges”—there’s been a murder.” As the assembled spectators gasp and titter (Shiro thinks he sees one go bolting towards the doors and probably the press) the boy purses his lips. “More than one, Mr. Holt thinks. Probably eight.”“Well,” Keith says with a sort of quiet amusement that Shiro really doesn’t think is appropriate in this situation, “that’s one way to get out of dinner.”Or, the steampunk Sherlock Holmes AU that no one wanted that I'm providing anyway.





	1. is it poison, nanny?

“Are you certain that you can’t, perhaps, extend your engagement, Captain Shirogane?”

The question is spoken with the sort of delicate tremulousness of a man hoping against all hope that the answer they will receive is not, in fact, the answer they expect to hear. It hurts something still soft and sensitive around the edges of Shiro’s heart that three years of flying missions in the impossibly blue skies over Afghanistan had not managed to turn to stone. (— _the scream of wind, the torque putting pressure on his chest until it felt like it would burst, flame bursting along the rear right aileron, who is screaming? So high and cutting _—) He pats the hand clasped on his wrist carefully. He’s still not entirely comfortable with his prosthetic, half expecting at any time that a random neural spasm could cause it malfunction and crush the delicate human architecture under his fingers, and thus finds himself correspondingly gentle.__

Then again, Shiro supposes, he has always been a gentle person. It is the privilege of someone born to his size and strength.

He smiles, with that same gentleness, and pats the weathered hand wrapped around his wrist again. “My fiancé,” Shiro comments with the abiding fondness that has become reflexive anytime he’s given the opportunity to speak on the subject of his betrothed, “is not a patient man. To his mind, the engagement has already gone on quite long enough.”

Commander Iverson makes a face like a man sucking on a year’s worth of lemons and then sighs. “I suppose I understand,” he grumbles, “young love and all that rot.”

Soon to be on the other side of thirty, Shiro’s not quite certain he deserves the sort of benign condescension that a certain type of middle-aged man takes when discussing the romantic entanglements of the young. He smiles politely instead of saying anything and leads the retired Commander out of his offices. 

“Will you be continuing your practice, Captain?” Commander Iverson asks with the sort of querulous tone that only the elderly can get. 

“After a honeymoon and settling in period, yes.” He holds open the door, but the Commander makes no move to exit. Shiro suppresses a sigh. All of his patients have been taken with a certain trepidation over his impending nuptials. Half swore until they were blue in the face that he intends to retire and live off of his husband-to-be’s inheritances, while the other half could not be convinced that he intended to move into his married abode without any … lingering attachments. 

“Good,” Commander Iverson rumbles. “That’s good.”

“If you could, maybe, reassure any of the other retired officers that you might, perhaps, meet at your club…?”

“Of course, Captain,” Commander Iverson shrugs himself into his coat. “They will be greatly relieved to hear that this … dalliance—”

“I’m getting married, Commander Iverson.”

Iverson grumbles something that Shiro works hard not to hear. It’s almost funny the way the sigh that rattles through the man’s big frame seems to come from somewhere under the molten core of the Earth. “Indeed.” This is said with such dryness that Shiro chooses to be amused. It’s either that or throw the Commander out on his ear and Shiro is, despite Iverson’s best efforts some days, honestly fond of the man. “They will be gratified to hear that you will not be sabotaging your very promising career.”

Iverson says, ‘very promising’ with the same sort of emphasis that Shiro’s dowager aunt used to put on the phrase ‘career building.’ It’s uncanny. Shiro has the brief, and frankly terrifying, idea of introducing Commander Iverson and his aunt, IJA Major Katsuragi. He has to physically stop himself from shuddering at the idea. There are days, several and often in quick succession, that Shiro thinks that he ought to give thanks to whatever local _kami_ that might reside in London for the fact that England and Japan, both tiny little islands with delusions of grandeur, manage to be allies. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

“Of course, Commander,” Shiro says while holding out the man’s scarf with a pointed gesture, “I rather doubt that my fiancé would tolerate me becoming a gentleman of leisure.”

“Indeed,” Iverson says, more to himself than to Shiro. “The Wilder boy, what was his name, certainly wouldn’t have tolerated it.”

There will come a day, Shiro knows, when people referencing Adam—casually, as if Shiro didn’t still dream of fire and the smell of burning flesh and etheric forces ripping his plane to pieces as he fights to find a place to land in the endless blue over the Caucasus Mountains—doesn’t feel like someone has decided to reach into his chest and hold his still beating heart in their hand. But today is not that day. Shiro can feel the fine muscles in his jaw work for a moment as he beats the emotions back down into their boxes. He’s vaguely aware of Iverson’s worried and then chagrined expression. 

He nods without look up.

“No,” Shiro says softly, “Adam wouldn’t have tolerated it either.”

A sudden bang interrupts them. Commander Iverson drops to the floor instinctively. Shiro huddles behind the dubious protection of his medical cabinet, his heart rate going a thousand miles a minute. He has the presence of mind to (gently, always gently) step on Iverson’s hand before the man can draw his gun as training demands as three more shots go off in rapid succession. 

In retrospect, if anyone suggested that he felt relieved at the interruption—tried to call him up on a witness stand to testify—he would _lie_. But in the immediate chaos, Shiro can only sigh a quick breath of relief that the conversation has been brought to a quick and definitive end. His delicate emotions can only take so much, even years after events.

“Good god!” Iverson thunders from where he lays prone in a classic military defensive crouch. “That’s gunfire.”

“No,” Shiro says immediately as if he weren’t pressing himself in the narrow space between his cabinet and the wall. “No. Um. My colleague is just, ah, hanging a picture.”

And Shiro is almost certainly going to find a convenient to point to hang his ‘colleague.’

Another pair of shots have both him and Commander Iverson huddling into their respective hiding places, breathing in that slow and careful way that military men tend to have when they’ve been badly startled, before Shiro pushes himself out of his comforting nook. Iverson gives him a look like he’s lost his entire godsdamned mind. Shiro’s not entirely certain that he’s wrong. 

“I’ll just go, ah,” Shiro internally prevaricates, “go check on things.”

“That was gunfire,” Iverson tries to thunder. The potency of his declaration is somewhat damaged by the fact that he refuses to raise his face from the floor. “I did not serve in Her Majesty’s Airforce only to fail to recognize the sound of gunfire.”

“Hammer and nail,” Shiro says as he sidles around Iverson’s prone form. He is going to wring Matthew’s brilliant and insane neck. He is. No jury will ever convict him. “Surely.”

He manages to get out of his offices without either hyperventilating himself into a panic attack or getting shot by Iverson in a fit of battle fatigue. One of these days, probably a day in the not too distant future, he is going to sit Matt down and explain to him (carefully! gently!!) all the ways in which a mind will not handle well the repeated sound of a gun being fired if that mind has, for example, been to war multiple times. Like, say, the minds of himself and most of his patients. 

“Captain Shirogane!”

Gods preserve him.

“Mr. Garrett,” Shiro says in his most soothing bedside manner. 

“He’s got a gun,” Hunk says anxiously. The tea set in his broad hands rattles as he trembles from head to toe. The man stands at least a solid inch taller than Shiro and several stone heavier, and even so Shiro is compelled to try to reassure and protect the younger man. “Shiro.” Hunk’s deep brown eyes are filled with concern and trepidation. “I’m not going in there while he’s got gun. I can’t.”

Shiro gently takes the tea service from Hunk and smiles reassuringly. “And you don’t have to,” he says quietly. His hands clench around the tray until they turn white and the silver of the tray complains under the force of his prosthetic when another gunshot rips through the air. ‘I’ll—”

“That’s the smell of gunpowder!” Iverson, if he were a less distinguished person, yelps. But because he is a distinguished military officer with a long and glorious record in the service of Her Majesty and Her Majesty’s allies, he does no such undignified thing. Iverson stares with naked horror at the closed doors of Matt’s rooms. “I know the smell of gunpowder, Captain! That’s not appropriate in a domestic environment!”

“It’s, ah,” Shiro starts and finds absolutely no words that might helpfully explain the situation. He lifts the tea service in a manner meant to explain something. “I’ll just—” another shot rings out and both Iverson and Hunk take a large step backward in unison—”right.”

“Can’t he move with you, Captain Shirogane?” Hunk pleads. “He’ll have the whole house down inside a fortnight without you here to talk him into being a, uh, hrm.”

“Civilized member of society,” Iverson supplies with the particularly pinched look that people tend to get when confronted with Matthew’s brilliance and complete disdain for little societal conventions like not firing handguns in a residence for no conceivable reason. “Not a feral fucking madman masquerading as a gentleman and a scholar?”

“Yes!” Hunk agrees with more vehemence than Shiro really thinks is necessary. 

“And no,” Iverson says before Shiro can interject, “that madman cannot move with the Captain into his marital home.”

“I don’t see why you have any room to say anything about the Captain’s decisions,” Hunk flares.

Iverson draws himself up to his not insignificant height and tries to glower down at Hunk. This is an endeavor doomed to failure because Hunk is built like the good Lord had decided his particularly sensitive soul needed to be housed in a frame structured like, as Matt had one time noted, a brick shithouse. Hunk inhales, his chest rising like a ship cresting the waves, and steps into Iverson’s carefully constructed bubble of personal space. They are like the mortal incarnation of an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. Shiro has a premonition that if he doesn’t get them separated and on better terms, they’ll bring the house down faster than Matt with his esoteric experiments ever could. 

He resists the urge to sigh with prodigious effort.

“Gentlemen,” Shiro says quietly. Their heads swivel towards him with an unnerving synchronicity. “Perhaps you’d like to remove the discussion to the tearoom downstairs where it’s a good bit quieter?”

They give him matching pinched looks.

“The whiskey is also down there,” he notes almost absently.

Iverson grumbles something about his nerves and trudges dutifully down the stairs. Hunk dithers a space longer. Shiro smiles reassuringly.

“I know you love him like a brother,” Hunk says despondently. “But he’s a madman. He’ll destroy the entire block if left unattended. Can’t you at least consider extending your engagement by a month?” Hunk’s eyes go large and beseeching. Shiro’s loyal hound, Black, couldn’t produce more pleading puppy eyes. “A week?”

“My betrothed is not a patient man,” Shiro explains for what feels like the hundredth time. “And our engagement has been quite long enough. He just needs another case. If you could look after the Commander…?” Shiro asks gently. Hunk sighs, nods, and starts his morose way down the stairs. “And Mr. Garrett, perhaps a shot of whiskey for yourself?” Hunk pauses on the stairs to consider this. “To settle your nerves.”

“I’ll be sauced eight days out of the week once you move out.”

“The good Lord only put seven days in a week, Mr. Garrett.”

“I know what I said.”

Shiro’s still laughing softly as he hip-checks the door open. There’s a faint rustle of movement off to his left and he ducks on reflex. He pauses, feeling foolish when no shot rings out. The room is full of deep shadows, the faint hissing of a kettle left to boil dry, and the particular odor of Matthew’s current obsession with anesthetic compounds. Shiro has the feeling that Matt is laughing at him even though the room is deadly silent in the aftermath of Matt’s recent decision to imitate a rifleman. 

“Permission to enter the armory?”

“Granted.”

Shiro has the barest impression of a thin, pale hand grasping a long-barreled revolver and steels himself. The shot is very loud. He can barely make out, across the room in the gloom, a board set up along the far wall covered in gunshot holes. He thinks they might spell something out, but his patience, at this point, has run utterly dry.

He sets the tea service down in a bare spot upon Matt’s drawing board before turning to regard him with a frown. Matt waves the revolver in a manner that is both remarkably reckless and utterly affected. Shiro contemplates, for a brief moment, strangling him with his own hair, which has grown well past his shoulders in a riot of auburn curls. It’s a very fetching rat’s nest on the top of Matt’s head. Shiro thinks he might actually be able to determine exactly how long it’s been since Matt’s roused himself enough to leave his rooms by amount of tangles his hair develops.

“I,” Matt says ponderously, “am in the process of inventing a device that diminishes the sound of a gunshot.”

Shiro throws open the heavy curtains blocking the air. Honestly, it’s a miracle that Matthew hasn’t regressed into some form of burrowing mole given the amount of time he spends in the dark tinkering about with his devices. Matt shouts as sunlight floods the room. Shiro catches him with one hand before he can burrow under his nest of blankets. Matt hisses at him and Shiro shakes him by the scruff of his neck a little before releasing him. 

“It’s not working,” Shiro notes. 

Matt whines. “I am a delicate genius, Shirogane. You can’t come destroying my environment like this. You’ll give me fits.”

“You give yourself fits.”

“Only when strange and unnatural variables are introduced into my environment, Shiro!”

There’s dust motes dancing in the air, lit by the late morning sun, and Matthew slouches across his settee like a debauched romantic poet. When Shiro tells him this, Matt sneers. 

“And besides,” Shiro says as he snatches the revolver out of Matt’s limp grip, “sunshine can hardly be considered unnatural.”

“It is unnatural to _me_.”

“Have you become a vampire, then?” Shiro asks as he unloads the revolver. He makes a show of crushing the remaining bullets with his prosthetic. Matt rolls his eyes expressively. “I’ll alert the presses. I’m sure there’s some of Lord Byron’s followers moping about Town.”

“You shut your heretic mouth,” Matt scolds as he tries to bundle himself back into his dressing gown. He’s at least wearing pants, which is a sight better than the state Shiro often finds him in. “I am a man of science.”

“You are a disaster, is what you are.”

“A fetching disaster?” 

Shiro’s not certain Matt intends for that to come out as a question. He looks over and finds that Matt has hauled himself upright via a firm grip on one of his bookcases. He’s pale, too skinny, and bare chested under his dressing grown. His hair falls in messy curls all about his face and shoulders. He looks as Lord Byron could only dream. A catastrophic mess of a man who looks like he tripped over an incubus’ bed, got dragged through orgy backwards, and the released into the wild on his own recognizance. He is, in a word, devastating.

“No.”

“You wound me.”

“I can wound you,” Shiro notes as he organizes the tumbling pile of unanswered letters and newspaper clippings. “I will wound you, if your experiments cause one of my patients to have a moment of battle fatigue in my offices.”

“Was it very loud, then?” Matt slinks up to him holding his dressing gown closed with one hand. His feet are bare. Shiro notes this distantly. He looks upset at the thought.

“Might I suggest that next time you take it into your head to revolutionize modern weaponry, you do so at your sister’s country estates?”

Matt makes an unhappy noise. “So, it was very loud. My apologies.”

It’s difficult to remain particularly upset with Matthew when he’s busy looking disheveled and contrite. Shiro sighs. “You need a new case,” he says instead. “You’re starting to drive yourself, and much more importantly, everyone else insane in your idleness.”

“I concur,” Matt says. Shiro has a moment of weakness and allows Matt to rest his head against shoulder. “Give me problems. Give me work. My mind rebels at stagnation.”

“You could at least try to look through your correspondences.”

“They aren’t correspondences if I don’t reply, Shirogane, as ‘to correspond’ implies an exchange of ideas, information,” Matt waves his hands about as he warms to his topic, “experiences with the truth of the universe.”

“Lady Radford writes here that her emerald bracelet is missing.”

“Insurance swindle,” Matt says promptly. “Lord Radford likes fast women and slow ponies.” He beams. “See, exchange of information.”

Shiro finds he can’t argue with this and thus doesn’t try. He steers Matt into an overstuffed armchair and nudges the tea set at him. Matt obediently picks up a teacup. He makes a small, delighted noise at discovering the pot full of his favorite noxious blend of something that purports to be tea but Shiro feels more strongly resembles cocaine in liquid form. Shiro flips through a few more letters.

“Mrs. Ramsey of Queen’s Park reports that her nephew has disappeared.”

“He’s in Belgium with a scullery maid. If found he will confess to a sudden fit of nerves due to his impending defense of his thesis, for which he is woefully under prepared.”

Shiro can’t stop the little ‘hm!’ of surprise that buzzes out of him. 

“Lord Blackwood has written you fou—”

“No, no, no, and _no_ ,” Matt suddenly shouts. Shiro arches an eyebrow as Matt slouches down into his chair like a schoolboy trying to avoid a telling off. He gestures at the letter Shiro is holding with his teacup. “Shan’t,” he says definitively, “accept any case from that man.”

“You need a case, even if it doesn’t come from one of the Lords or Ladies,” Shiro tells him mildly. He considers this statement for a moment and adds, “they do pay better, or at least more consistently, on average.”

Matt sulks before announcing with an air he clearly thinks is dignified and not at all like a small boy declaring he hates broccoli: “I have no need to go find a case like a common hawker at the market. One will come to me, when the time is right. They always do.”

Shiro regards him for a long moment until Matt squirms. “You have been in these rooms for the past fortnight without any reprieve. As your doctor—”

Matt makes a very rude noise. Shiro closes his eyes and prays for patience, gentleness, and the strength to not strangle Matthew with his own hair.

“—as your _friend_ , you need to get out.”

“There is nothing,” Matt says from his sulking slouch in his ridiculous armchair—truly, he looks like nothing so much as a little boy being told he can’t splash about in mud puddles—and gesturing with his teacup, “out there, in the world, that interests me. At all.”

There are days, all the ones ending in ‘y’ to be precise, when Shiro wonders how he became acquainted with, much less friends, this half-feral, entirely fae creature. “Then you’re free this evening?” He asks mildly as he studies one of the letters begging for his help that Matt has left lying about.

“Naturally.”

“Dinner?”

“Wonderful.”

“The Royale?”

“My favorite.”

Shiro sticks his hands in his pockets. “Keith’s coming.”

He can see the exact moment Matt realizes that he’s made a mistake that he cannot correct. Better, he can see the moment when Matt realizes the same. Matt sticks his nose in the air and pretends to study his nails. “I have a prior engagement.”

“You’re meeting him, Matthew,” Shiro says has he takes the whiskey bottle Matt’s fished out from under his armchair from him. He sets it on the mantle gently. “No more of your evasions.”

Matt mouths something silently that Shiro pretends not to understand before tilting his head to study him. “You haven’t proposed yet, have you?”

“We’ve discussed this.”

“It’s not official then,” Matt says this with a boyishly hopeful air. It makes his entire demeanor young and charming. This is, Shiro reflects, often how he keeps people from strangling him over his latest antics. 

“I just haven’t found the right ring,” he says gently. “It’s happening whether you like it or not.”

Matt rubs a hand over his mouth as he looks for something to say. Shiro decides to cut this off at the pass before it devolves into a shouting match.

“8:30. The Royale. Wear a jacket,” Shiro says. He resists punctuating his pronouncement by pointing a finger at Matt, but only just.

“You wear a jacket.”

Shiro closes his eyes, sighs, and sees himself out.

* * *

It is not to say that Matt intends to skip dinner. He is, as a general rule, a very punctual sort of man. Nearly pathological in his need to be early to all of his engagements—best to be early and observe the lay of the land, he’s found. But he had also been entirely serious and not at all facetious when he’d said that his cases found him. It’s like, if you have a mind given to flights of fancy (which Matt certainly does not, he is a man of science, thank you), fate. 

He catches himself with a hand around the emergency handle by the window when his cab comes to a sudden, screeching halt. There’s a faint thump at the top of the cab before the driver starts a litany of profanity that demonstrates the depth and flexibility of a South Londoner’s vocabulary. He almost wishes he had his notebook available to jot some of it down. His driver has an _excellent_ turn of phrase.

“Here, be off with you,” the man shouts. Matt looks up through the little trapdoor at the top of the cab and is greeted with the truly unfortunate view straight up the man’s left nostril. It’s red. And flaring.

“This is Mister Holt’s cab, though, ain’t it?” Pipes a little demanding voice. Matt’s eyebrows soar to his hairline. He has not, to his knowledge, given the Thames wharf rats reason to come looking for him.

There’s a repeated thumping on the side of the cab as his driver makes the universal noise for ‘go fuck off and bother some other gent’ at the urchin. “This is a gentleman’s cab, and of no concern of yours.”

“I’ve got a case for ‘im, haven’t I?” And that _is_ interesting.

He pops open the door and looks down into a grubby face of one Bandor Chabert. The boy scrubs at his nose, leaving a smear of river mud across his cheeks. While it’s not unusual for the wharf rats to be a bit draggled, they are not normally quite utterly _be_ draggled. He gets a prompt and slightly smug grin when Bandor marks him.

“Ban,” he greets. “You have caught me in between cases, and thus have my every interest.”

Anything the Thames wharf rats have collectively decided needs to be brought to the attention of adults—thus risking a rounding up and taking to one of the hideous institutions purporting itself to be an orphanage, or at the very least a good scrubbing—is something that he certainly wants to see.

“Found a creature for you, Mr. Holt. Like in that book what that play was based on.”

This is, frankly, an astonishing sentence. Not in the least because it manages to communicate precisely nothing of which he can make sense. “A creature?”

“All stitched parts,” Ban says while the driver fumes. He draws lines around his skinny wrists and neck. “Thought you’d want to see it before the coppers came and made a mess of your investigation.”

It might be possible, Matt reflects, that he’s relied a little too heavily upon the Thames wharf rats in his recent investigations if they are making these sorts of assumptions. However. They are not wrong.

“Right,” he says. He tosses some coins up to the cab driver as he hops down. The man looks at him as if Matt has completely lost his mind. It’s not an unusual expression for people to adopt when around him for any length of time. “This is my stop, it appears,” he tells the driver amiably. “Your fare.”

“Little bastard is like as not to be leading you to a couple of rough customers, your lordship,” the man says with a worried frown. Ban bares his teeth.

“I rather think not,” Matt replies calmly as he drops a warning hand on top of Ban’s mess of brown curls. “We have a mutually beneficial business arrangement wherein he alerts me to interesting goings on about Town and I pay him a decent sum and don’t make too many comments about his general juvenile delinquency.”

Ban makes a rude little noise, but it’s muted so Matt ignores it. The driver regards them both a bit more closely.

“Oh, here then,” the man says with a sort of startled wonder, “you’re that detective bloke.”

Matt sighs. Inventor, scholar, and man of science and this is what the general public remembers of him. ‘That detective bloke.’ He’d blame the sensationalist press, but honestly they only give the people what the people want: an entertaining distraction from their cares and worries. He tries for Shiro’s reassuring smile. The driver frowns. Matt stops smiling. The expression on his face, Matt reflects, probably looks a little manic. 

“Indeed,” he says. “I am.”

The driver leans over the top of the cab with a leer that he probably thinks is conspiratorial. “I’ll be reading about this in the papers then?”

Matt sincerely hopes not, but it is unfortunately highly likely. “Perhaps.”

“Well,” the driver leans back and then flips the coins he’d just used to pay the fare back at him. “The drive is worth the story, I think.”

Matt plucks the coins out of the air and then, after a moment’s thought, tosses one to Ban, who makes it disappear with alacrity. 

“Getting famous-like,” Ban observes with the sort of knowing worldliness that only a street urchin can have and the Hansom cab rattles off.

“It does seem to be a hazard of being successful in this profession.”

“Oh,” Ban coos in a thoroughly irreverent manner. “Such a hardship for your lordship.”

Matt knocks him with his cane lightly. “Keep a civil tongue behind your teeth,” he warns. “I’m no one’s lord.”

“Nah, you works for your dinner, don’t you?” Ban says as skips out of Matt’s reach with the nimbleness of a rat. He eyes Matt’s dinner attire. “Going to ruin all your fine clothes, ‘cause what’s you need to see is in the mudflats. It’s nasty.”

“You’ve promised me a creature,” Matt says as he follows obligingly along after Ban’s helter-skelter path. “I think that worth cost of a pair of pants.”

Ban’s face goes solemn in a way Matt distrusts immediately. “Not only a creature,” he says seriously. “But the little ‘uns, they’re talking about a monster.”

Creatures and monsters and scared children. This is not the way Matt had expected his evening to go. He arches an eyebrow expectantly. 

“Takes children,” Ban says, his face is a thundercloud of displeasure. “Kids whats got no parents and no one looking out for ‘em.”

“Please tell me your hellion of a sister isn’t planning on fighting said monster with a torch and a tree branch while she’s in nothing but her petticoats.” 

Which had been his first introduction to Romelle Chabert. She’d been holding her own against a black dog summoned by etheric forces to terrorize the wharfs as part of a greedy developer’s scheme to run off the fisherfolk and barge operators living on the banks of the Thames. Romelle continues to be a brilliant and terrifying young woman. Matt lives in fear that one day he’ll have Ban on his doorstep in tears over his sister’s death because she’s gotten into more trouble than she can reasonably set on fire and stomp on. 

“No, sir,” Ban answers promptly. Matt blinks at the title given with seemingly all sincerity. “I made her promise, I did.”

Matt doesn’t put much stake in that promise, and from the expression on Bandor’s face, neither does he. They both sigh. “Well,” Matt says after they’ve had a moment to consider Romelle and her recklessness. “Lead me to your creature before either the constables from the Yard find it, or your sister does.”

* * *

Shiro snaps his pocket watch closed with a sigh. Keith cocks his head to the side, a wry little smile on his face. 

“You’re being stood up,” Keith notes blithely. They’re in a little corner table and the waitstaff are regarding them with that polite sort of dismay and gentle pity that only comes when everyone knows that you’re waiting for someone who isn’t going to show. “Again.”

“He’ll be here,” Shiro says with more conviction than he feels. He is going to _hang_ Matt.

Keith doesn’t directly contradict him, just makes a little humming noise in the back of his throat as he looks around the room. He looks far more comfortable in the middle of the noise and posturing of the Royale than Shiro’d expected. They are surrounded by the peers of the realm, each decked in their finest attire, and Keith only looks slightly bored. 

A waiter approaches them solicitously. “Perhaps an aperitif while the gentlemen wait?”

Shiro opens his mouth to demure, but Keith beats him to the punch. 

“Please,” he says with a tiny smile. Their waiter is instantly charmed and simpers. The man has to be well into his sixties if he’s a day. Shiro will never get used to the nearly careless way Keith has of wrapping people around his finger. Shiro’d be suspicious of it, but Keith seems to be utterly unaware of his impact upon people. “And perhaps wine?”

“Of course, sir.”

“He’ll be here,” Shiro says again.

“Hm.” Keith holds out his glass as the maître pours him a glass. 

“Something must have kept him.”

“Hm.”

“I’m sure he has a reason.” And if Matt doesn’t have a damned good reason, he’s going to commit homicide and no court will find him guilty.

* * *

There’s a pale little body lying in the river mud as the Thames slowly pulls away from its banks, revealing all manner of things the river has claimed for its own. The dress tangled around her little legs is a deep and brilliant emerald. Heavy fabric. Some kind of winter wool of far better quality than anyone in this neighborhood could possibly afford. Her limbs are very pale against the black mud and rich green of her dress.

Mud squelches underneath his boots, staining his pants, as Matt kneels. He’s ringed by the Thames wharf rats, their little faces uniformly solemn, and the wind blows the smell of the Thames’ at low tide all around them. He looks down river.

“How far to the Teddington lock?”

“That’s all the way down in Kingston, ain’t it?” One of the boys asks. “That’s miles away.”

“About ten miles,” Ban answers, thoughtful. He’s been around on Matt’s investigations more than once. He knows when Matt starts asking random questions, they’re for a reason. “If you go straight, not following the river.”

Matt hums his acknowledgement of this fact and reaches for the body. Immediately the boys around him cry out. He pauses, hand still outstretched, and considers them out of the corner of his eyes. They fidget under his considering gaze until the throng shuffles and disgorges a boy that can’t be more than ten with ears he’ll never grow into.

“You don’t want to touch ‘er, sir,” he says as they all nod. “I went to poke her, like, to see if she were breathing, and it grabbed me.”

That is an extraordinary piece of information. Matt sits back on his heels. “Grabbed you?”

There’s more fidgeting and shuffling before Ban huffs an annoyed breath. “Go on and tell ‘em,” he orders. “If we can’t trust Mr. Holt, we can’t trust no one.”

The boys look at each other as they consider this. There’s a certain solidarity among children the world has otherwise forgotten, and that solidarity clearly extends to the poor collection of limbs rearranged into the parody of a little girl. There’s a simmering rage in the Thames wharf rats. A rage that Matt sympathizes with deeply.

“I thought I recognized her,” the boy says. “There’s a girl—“ none of the boys jostle at him about this, which Matt finds extraordinary and telling of the situation in general—“at the Columbia road market, the one with all the flowers, we talked.” He jerks his chin at the creature in the muddle, all sprawled limbs and burgeoning putrefaction. “That’s got her face.” All the boys glare at the creature. It’s the expression of people who are horrified, but with no words to express that horror. “It’s got her head, don’t it?”

“Do you remember the girl’s name?” Matt asks gently even as his stomach turns.

“Alice, sir,” the boy’s bottom lip wobbles, “her name was Alice.”

“Did she have parents?” He asks. He rather doubts it, but best to be sure. The boys shake their heads. “Siblings.” More head shaking. “Anyone at all?”

“No,” Ban says. “It’s like I told you. Someone’s stealing them whats got no one.”

“She weren’t alone,” the boy says hotly. The other boys cluster close, catching his arms with dirty hands, not to hold him back, but just to hold him. “She had me. I noticed.”

Matt stands up and sweeps off his cloak. The boys watch in silence as he settles it around the crumpled figure delicately. “And now she has me,” he says seriously. The boys look at him for a long moment and then nod as if agreeing to some unspoken pact. “Now. I need you to fetch someone. Be quick and don’t take no for answer until you get him.”

* * *

“What do you think it’ll take to force him to accept that this is happening?” Keith asks. He’s loose-limbed with a glass of wine in him on an empty stomach. He cocks his head to the side with that little smile that makes Shiro’s heart contract painfully every time he sees it. “He’s stood you up. Again.”

“I’m sure he has a good reason,” Shiro defends though its more performative than heart-felt. 

“What was it last time?” Keith asks as he toys with his wine glass. “Something about harnessing the etheric forces of the moon that could not be delayed?”

Shiro opens his mouth and then closes it when he can find no good explanation of that excuse.

“And the time before that was, what?” Keith taps his finger to the glass. “He needed to readjust his instruments for changes in the gravitational waves of the earth?”

Shiro presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose and sighs.

“And the time before that he said he had to wash his hair.”

“I know,” Shiro sighs. “I know. He’s being difficult about this and I don’t know why.”

Keith quirks an eyebrow at him which Shiro does not feel he deserves at all. 

“It’s not like that.”

Whatever response Keith had been about to make is thankfully cut off by a sudden racket rising up from the back of the restaurant. Every waiter in the room turns, and, as a unified force, begins to move towards the disturbance. He and Keith exchange a look. The Grand Royale is not the sort of establishment to have loud, exciting disturbances. Particularly during the evening hours when the entirety of the peerage is in attendance with the general intent to impress one another.

“Let me go!”

The voice is young, shrill with rage, and with a thick South London accent. It is not the sort of voice one expects to hear at high society establishment. More importantly, Shiro recognizes that voice, though he’d never expected to hear it at the Royale. Shiro’s gratified when Keith rises with him in wordless support. They make their ways towards the back, gently moving past the clustering peerage and whispering onlookers.

“Sirs, if you’ll just step back,” the maître says as he moves to block them. Shiro neatly steps around him and Keith just glowers him into submission.

“You!” Shiro sighs as Bandor Chabert eels his way out of the grip of one of the waiters. The boy is filthy and smells like a bog. “Mr. Holt says you’re to come right away.”

“Does he.”

Keith’s laughing quietly behind him in a manner that Shiro finds frankly insulting. 

“He’s at the river’s edge—” a singularly unhelpful location as the Thames has a lot of edges”—there’s been a murder.” As the assembled spectators gasp and titter (Shiro thinks he sees one go bolting towards the doors and probably the press) the boy purses his lips. “More than one, Mr. Holt thinks. Probably eight.”

“Well,” Keith says with a sort of quiet amusement that Shiro really doesn’t think is appropriate in this situation, “that’s one way to get out of dinner.”

* * *

“What would it take, Mr. Holt,” Detective Inspector Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe asks with the air of one who does not expect any sort of sensible answer, “to convince you to alert us to your investigations prior to initiating them?”

“You aren’t going to be able to observe anything from up there,” Matt says rather than answer the question. Really, at this point if the good inspector hasn’t become acquainted with Matt’s preferred methodologies, he never will. 

Coran sighs. “What is there to observe?” He asks as he trudges his way over to where Matt stands observing the river as it creeps back up its banks with the rising tide. “It washed up from somewhere upstream.”

“Unlikely,” Matt says. He pats around his waistcoat for several moments, distracted, until Coran offers him a tidy little cigarillo and a light. Matt nods his thanks. “The Teddington locks are at least ten miles away and the Thames flows at a rate of sixty-six square meters per second.”

“And what, pray tell, does that have to do with the price of fish in Persepolis?” Coran asks as he kneels down next to the little body. His face grows pain. “Ach. She’s just a tiny thing.”

“About eight tiny things,” Matt says. He sees no reason ease the Detective Inspector into things gently. “If my count is right, but we’ll have to wait for the good doctor to confirm my analysis.”

“ _Eight_ ,” Coran starts and then sucks in a breath. “Bugger me,” he mutters low and frustrated. “It’s the London Burker mess all over again.”

“The Anatomy Act passed thirty years ago and with it came an end to the legal gray area of selling cadavers to medical institutions for dissection,” Matt points out. Coran rolls his eyes. “I doubt we’ll find many with political motives for reenacting resurrectionists’ political protest over the death of their profession.”

Coran snorts. “That’s a particularly twisty way of describing one of the worst strings of murders, and their particularly horrid outcome, in London history.”

“And yet,” Matt says as he considers his watch, “that’s how the educated class prefers to remember it.”

“And the uneducated class?”

Matt turns to smile at Coran. He knows his smile is cold and ironic. “Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ and the overweening arrogance of the thaumaturgists.”

Detective Inspector Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe did not become the head of Scotland Yard by being a stupid man. He makes a face. “So, it is politics.”

“Or someone wants us to think it’s politics.”

“The regulation of the study of etheric sciences would put a bit of cramp upon you, wouldn’t Mr. Holt, and your personal explorations?” Coran says this with an ironic arched eyebrow and a twirl of his mustache. 

Matt flaps a hand. “I’m a member of the Royal Society in good standing,” he says dismissively. “I just have little patience for standing about in musty lecture halls listening to the sound of my own voice when the world has such rich and varied experiences to bestow.”

Coran makes a disbelieving little sound and gently moves a bit of their macabre doll’s clothes to consider the rate of putrefaction. “Whatever,” he pauses for a moment as he considers his words and grimaces when he finds them all to be distasteful “cadavers the perpetrator used to make this poor thing must not have been in the ground long.”

“Or in the ground at all.”

“Murder, then,” Coran sighs. They consider each other again. “If we’ve got another Robert Knox on our hands, there’ll be riots.”

“Mr. Knox was never prosecuted, and the Royal Society cleared him all malfeasance as he was ignorant of where the bodies for his experiments were obtained from.”

“And that’s why he went on to live so fruitfully in Edinburgh,” Coran returns drily. He sits back on his haunches and considers Matt. His eyes are very blue. “Did he have any students, I wonder?”

Matt quicks an eyebrow at him. “That is the start of an excellent line of inquiries, Detective Inspector.” 

“I’d be insulted about your blithe assumption that Scotland Yard exists to do your preliminary inquiries, but your doctor is here and perhaps we can finally move our poor creature out of the mud. Although,” Coran casts a considering eye over the mud flats, “that might be what’s keeping the body so well preserved.”

“Not with the tide rising,” Matt returns as he starts making his careful way to where Shiro stands glowering balefully down at them. A young man with long black hair and wicked scar curving up his cheek loiters with intent next to him. Matt requires no deductive capacities to determine who he must be. This conversation, he notes to himself, promises to be all kinds of interesting.

“Shiro,” he calls at his most cheerful. “I see you got my summons, come down here.”

“Your summons proved extremely difficult to ignore.”

Ban, standing in the shadow of Shiro’s impressive bulk, beams.

“Excellent,” Matt announces. “Now come down here.”

Shiro does no such thing, only continues to glower down at him like Matt deliberately goes and seeks out dead, mutilated children to give Shiro headaches. That glower is really quite impressive. 

“You said there was a dead body,” Shiro starts.

“Or eight?” The young man next to Shiro finally interjects. Shiro sighs.

“You must be Keith,” Matt says as he bounces his way up the creaking, slick steps leading onto the river docks. Shiro catches his elbow when he slips. Matt takes the opportunity to catch Keith’s hand and kiss the back of it as if he were greeting a gentlelady. Keith’s eyebrow quirks and a ghost of a smile flits across his face. “For the life of me I don’t know why he hasn’t introduced us properly.” Matt links his elbow through Keith’s as if they were a pair of schoolgirls off for a walk before turning to Shiro. “Go inspect the poor creature, Mr. Shirogane, while I gossip about you behind your back. Ban can show you the way.”

Shiro opens his mouth to object, and probably say something quite hurtful about Matt’s general character, when Keith settles his hand in the crook of Matt’s elbow and smiles at his betrothed. “It’s fine,” he says in a soft, horribly affectionate voice. “I can handle myself.”

Matt opens up his mouth and then closes it. “I find I can make no follow up comment that doesn’t sound absolutely torrid and I really would rather not get shanked this evening, if at all possible.”

“I wouldn’t stab you for being insulting,” Shiro huffs. “I’d strangle you with your own hair.”

Matt nods, because he knows this. He really is taking his life into his own hands growing his hair as long as he is. “Perhaps not,” he concedes, “but your betrothed absolutely would.”

Next to him, Keith goes very still.

Shiro looks adorably confused, like a Labrador puppy that’s just licked a lemon, all scrunched face and disbelief. 

Matt spreads Keith’s fingers where they lay draped across his forearm. “Observe the calluses along the subject’s right palm—”

“ _Subject_ ,” Shiro starts, but Keith forestalls him with a raised hand.

“I have heard so much about you,” Keith says in his quiet voice. “You’re almost all Shiro talks about—” and that comes as a surprise to Matt, but a quick glance at Shiro’s face finds it full of consternation rather than outrage, so the comment cannot be too far of its mark. Hm. Interesting. “—and I have a pile of detective novels a home.”

“That last bit, sadly,” Shiro interjects with a sigh, “is true. Poe, mostly.”

“I’d be fascinated to see what you can determine about me.”

Matt flicks another look at Shiro suddenly feeling off center and awkward. “Perhaps some other time, the tide is coming in.”

Keith smiles. It’s an expression with a great deal of teeth. “I’m sure you can be quick.”

That. That’s a challenge if Matt has ever heard one. “All right,” Matt says slowly. “Well. Calluses along your palms and the edge of your pointer finger suggest a swordsman grip. However, you did not shift me away from your dominate side, suggesting you are ambidextrous,” Keith cocks his head to the side with a demure little smile, “none of this is particularly surprising given the scar along your right cheek. Most would take it as a burn scar, but, if observed closely, it is clearly a form of a Lichenberg figure. As you have no difficulties controlling your extremities, we must rule out of a lightening strike. The only other explanation being, instead, a strike made by an etheric blast—most likely quintessence fueled—that you mostly dodged but leaving you with that mark.”

Matt pulls Keith up along the little embankment and turns him towards the fitful light of one of the iron wrought street lamps. Keith lets him, but Matt gets the impression from the tension in his shoulders and the slow, swaggering walk as he drifts along in Matt’s wake, that he will not continue to be so docile for much longer. 

“Now,” Matt says as he studies the scar. Up close and in the light it almost looks filigreed, a deep purple against Keith’s pale skin. “Most men, even men who have served in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, do not come into direct contact with battle-trained thaumaturgists. Exceptions, take our Captain Shirogane—”

“I intend to,” Keith murmurs lowly. Matt smiles at him. 

“—do exist. However, you do not have the baring of a military man. Formalwear sits uncomfortably for you—you’ve corrected the set of your collar eleven times in the past twenty-three minutes. And you, for the lack of a better word, swagger rather than march when you walk with purpose.”

Keith quirks an eyebrow at him. “I thought this was to be a quick deduction?”

Matt sighs. “Taking these things together: you were an agent of Her Majesty’s anti-thaumaturgical unit, the Paladins, during the Crimean War. A combat unit outside normal military command. Experimental. Disbanded after the war. You were among the first deployed to Sevastapol and were part of the siege that broke etheric barrier holding back the allied forces from pushing forward up the peninsula. Now, what I find most interesting, Mr. Kogane, is not your obvious scars or calluses, but a little tan mark.”

Keith cocks his head in the universal gesture of condescending confusion. Matt taps his ring finger.

“There once sat a band here,” he says as he watches Keith’s expression. There’s a split-second flinch around the eyes. It makes Matt feel better for Shiro, but worse about what he’s going to say. “An engagement band, an open secret as the Paladins forbid inter-unit romances. You wore the ring proudly until the last days of the war.”

Keith pulls away from him. The fine muscles in his jaw work. Most likely grinding his teeth.

“He died during the Battle of Balaclava, the Russian’s final, and most disastrous, counter-attack. They were repulsed, but your betrothed died and you mourned him until the day you met Captain Shirogane.”

Keith looks down, eyelashes fluttering, and breathes out slowly. Shiro moves to touch him, but Keith holds out a hand. Matt’s heart aches at the pain in those dark eyes, so deep a blue they look nearly purple. 

“His name was James,” Keith says quietly. He breathes out slowly. “And you are exactly as good at this kind of thing as the papers proclaim.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt says.

Keith shakes his head and puts his hands in his pockets. He jerks his chin towards the mud flats where the river creeps inexorably towards the crumpled creature. “Go,” he says with that quiet, aching dignity. “You have a murderer to catch.”

* * *

“I knew he’d been engaged,” Shiro says quietly as they watch Keith walk away. He wants to be angry with Matt, but mostly he’s just tired. “He told me the first week.”

“I know,” Matt says. Shiro looks at him sharply. It’d be easy to hate Matthew for the monstrousness of his intellect, the sharpness of his observations. Except. Matt looks back at him with clear sorrow in his amber eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry, Matthew,” Shiro says as he makes his way down the docks towards the figure huddled under Matt’s evening cloak. “Just.” Shiro sighs. “Think about the things you say before you say them.”

Matt follows close behind him. So close he can hear the deep sigh Matt blows out even when he can’t hear Matt’s light footsteps. “Would you believe that I do think about the things I say before I say them?” Matt asks. “Because I do.”

Shiro pauses and looks at him over his shoulder. It’s just starting to rain. A light, fine mist that beads along Matt’s long braid and turns his skin to porcelain. He is, Shiro thinks, unfairly beautiful in the rain.

“Try harder.”

Matt says nothing in reply as they squelch their way over to Coran and the little figure under Matt’s cloak. If Shiro slows down to a pace that could be overtaken by a wounded snail with a hangover, neither the Detective Inspector nor Matt mention it. He’s filled with a deep and growing foreboding. He does not want to lift the heavy drape of fabric over that tiny figure. He doesn’t want to see whatever ruin has been made of the body. 

Matt, however, is two-thirds arsehole and reaches down to whip his cloak away like a magician reveal a trick.

The girl is small. Her limbs akimbo from where the water left her in the mud. Her blonde hair matted down with filth and the sludgy mass of river weeds that grows along the bottom of the Thames. Shiro’s struck with a sudden, urgent need to vomit. The impulse so hard that he nearly gags. Coran offers him a handkerchief that Shiro presses against his nose and mouth until he can swallow the bile back down.

“This is a monstrosity,” he says faintly. Neither Coran nor Matt say anything in reply. They know.

Shiro kneels. Mud squishes up around his knees, black and viscous, utterly ruining his good evening trousers. He’s definitely going to make Matt pay for these. He tucks Coran’s handkerchief away, closes his eyes for a moment, and then starts to catalogue the monstrosity before him. 

“I’ll still need to take her to a proper examining room,” Shiro mutters. “But for initial assessments: Matthew is correct. Eight children went into the,” his mind rebels at trying to find a clinical way of describing sad collection of body parts sinking into the mud, “stitching of this,” Shiro swallows hard, “doll. I’ll have to conduct a proper autopsy to really be certain, but I’d say the parts were used before rigor mortis had set in.”

“So, they were killed on site,” Matt drawls. It’s the particular tone he takes when he’s feeling too many things, too intensely and has decided to shove all of them in a remote, locked box. “No waiting.”

“Eight children vanishing all at once would be noticed,” Coran comments.

“All component elements have the same rate of decay?” Matt asks.

Shiro stands and resists the urge wipe of his pants. Unfortunately, chasing Matt around on his investigations has already introduced him to the mud of the Thames river and all its noxious qualities. In particular, it’s stubborn refusal to removed by anything short of the most determined laundress and industrial bleach. The pants will likely have to be burned. 

“It appears so,” he replies. Matt has an odd look on his face. “Why? If they were all attached prior to onset of rigor mortis, as suggested by the puckering at the edges of the stitching, then all the limbs would have had to been,” Shiro grimaces, “removed and stitched at the same time.”

Matt nods slowly, his gaze distant. “Have you read Honerva Rabe’s treatise on the use of quintessence regulated ether to halt the degradation of soft tissue?”

Shiro sighs as Coran starts to swear. Things are so much easier to investigate when they don’t involve the etheric sciences.

* * *

Shiro catches his arm as Matt is about to hale a cab and get himself as far away from the wharf and its monstrous chatelaine as possible. He looks at Shiro’s hand for a long moment as if he doesn’t recognize the extremity. He wonders, briefly, what it will look like with a stately gold wedding band around one finger.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t be formal with me, Matt,” Shiro snaps. “Not after the evening we’ve just had.”

Matt wants, more than anything, to take Shiro with him as he goes to find himself two things in, ideally, quick succession: first, trouble of the boxing and gambling kind, and second, alcohol. But Shiro is a man to be married shortly and engaged men with beautiful, tragic fiancé’s have no business following one Matthew Holt on his crawl through depravity. He pries Shiro’s hand off his arm gently. 

“I,” he says with all the dignity he can muster, “am going to Shillelagh Hall.”

Shiro makes a face before squaring his shoulders. “I’m going with you.”

“No,” Matt shakes his head, “no, you are going home to think upon your lovely betrothed and save your wages for the appropriate ring. You absolutely will not be coming with me to make inadvisable bets and drinking your body weight in questionable whiskey.”

“Matt—”

Matt sticks two fingers in his mouth and whistles loud and shrill. A constable pops up immediately as if on springs. Of all the many things that he hates about his recently discovered fame, the near awe of the younger members of the constabulary is not among them. He gestures grandly to Shiro.

“This is Captain Shirogane, Constable, er?”

“Constable Curtis Westerly, sir.”

“Constable Curtis, this is my esteemed colleague Captain Shirogane, I would most grateful if you could see to it that he arrives at his lodgings?”

The salute is nearly textbook. Shiro fixes him with a dour glare. “Of course, sir!”

One day, Matt reflects as Shiro is carefully herded by the young constable into a cab, Shiro will discover how to be rude to earnest young men. But fortunately for Matt, today is not that day.

“Off to the bettin’ halls, Mr. Holt?” Ban has managed to materialize right at Matt’s elbow. He doesn’t jerk in surprise only through supreme self-control.

Matt glances at the boy only to get a look back that’s too knowing by half. “I feel the need to punch something very hard until it stops being recognizable.”

Ban sucks on his teeth for a minute. “’m Da used to be like that. Only one time he tried to lay a smack on me when Rom was home, and she kicked him through a wall.” Ban cocks his head, thoughtful. “Ain’t seen much of him since then.”

“Your sister is a terror.” 

Bandor’s skinny chest puffs up with unmistakable pride and he grins. “Don’t I know it.”

* * *

In retrospect, perhaps signing himself into the matches was not the wisest idea that Matt has ever had. Half his mind is wrapped around the particularly compelling mystery of the Thames river creature and the other half kept tripping on odd details of Shiro’s fiancé. He can’t tell if he’s honestly missing something about Keith Kogane, or if his emotions are getting the better of him. Either way, his focus is shot.

His opponent lowers his shoulder and slams him into the high wood wall of the ring. It rattles him for a moment, driving Matt’s breath right out of his body before he recovers himself. He claps, slow and infuriatingly lazy, as the brute’s nostrils flare.

Matt open hand blocks the wild swing thrown at his solar plexus and then smacks the man’s face as a counter. They circle. The crowd chants loud and frothing, as his opponent tries to body slam him again. Clearly, he’s gotten used to being the largest thing in the ring and using all that mass to grind challengers into submission. Matt catches one hand, twists around the wrist, and sends the man slamming into the boards instead. 

The crowd howls his opponent’s name as he staggers to his feet again. The man’s stamina is truly impressive.

“Fight properly,” McMurdo shouts at him. 

Properly, Matt deduces, means standing still and trading jabs back and forth like prissy Oxford schoolboys who have never actually seen blood. Matt obligingly curls his hands into fists and puts them up like the parody of boxers found on advertisements. It earns him a sneer.

McMurdo grabs at him, meaty hands slipping across Matt’s sweat slicked skin, and Matt smacks him, open handed, right over the ears. A nasty four-four drumbeat right to the eardrums that has McMurdo dropping him and scrambling backwards, disoriented.

Matt smacks his ass just to be cute. Bad idea. McMurdo snaps around with a speed Matt had honestly not thought him capable of and punches him right in the kidney’s hard enough to bounce Matt off the boards.

He grabs at them, fingers scrambling, and drags himself up to standing. The crowd hands him whiskey and shouts encouragements and somehow he notices a tiny white handkerchief draped delicately over the edge of the boards. It is pristine. Pure.

Embroidered on the edges in rose pink are the initials AA.

Matt’s head swivels like it’s on a weathervane in the middle of a storm with gale force winds. The crowd is a uniform pale beige and grimy. Not a hint of silver-white hair or midnight skin among them. He crushes the handkerchief in one hand and imagines he can smell the spiced scent of juniper berries. It’s too perfectly placed to be anything but a message.

He doesn’t even see the blow that spins him around and lays him out.

“Get up and fight for real!” McMurdo howls, thoroughly enraged.

Matt drags himself up. His hair is coming out of his braid, all knots and grime. He must look a frightful mess. He rests his cheek against the boards, against her handkerchief, and breathes in the faint remainder of her scent. Through the crowd he can see her looking back at him. Her white hair piled in artful coils on her head. Her lips a full, deep red. She spots him watching her. She cocks her head, smile sly and charming.

“Good match,” he says distractedly as he staggers towards the gates. “You got me, big man.”

McMurdo makes a noise not unlike that of an enraged goose, before hurking up a wad of spit that would delight any ten-year-old boy and sending it hurtling straight at the back of Matt’s head. “We’re not done yet!”

She’s still watching him as he reaches up, feeling as if time is slowing down to this moment and her amused eyes, and touches the glob of spit in his hair. She winks, exaggerated, before leaning over to whisper to a bookie. They both look at him.

Matt doesn’t look away from her brilliant, amused, gaze as he slowly circles back to her handkerchief. He uses it to wipe the spit out his hair while McMurdo shouts. Time moves queerly. 

_First,_ he thinks as he watches the scene play out in his head, _distract target_

_Then, block his blind jab._

_Counter with jab to left cheek._

_Discombobulate with palm clap to both ears._

_Dazed, he’ll attempt wild haymaker. Employ elbow block, and body shot._

_Block feral left. Weaken right jaw._

_Now fracture with right jab._

_Break cracked ribs. Traumatize solar plexus._

_Dislocate jaw entirely. Heel kick to diaphragm._

_In summary, ears ringing, jaw fractured, three ribs cracked, four broken, diaphragm hemorrhaging, physical recovery: six weeks._

_Full psychological recovery: six months._

_Ability to spit at back of head: neutralized_.

Matt blinks. Time begins to move at its regular speed again. She’s gone. Now, all that is left to do is implement. Time speeds up. For less than one hundred and eighty seconds all Matt hears or sees is the slap of skin across skin until the boards break under the weight of McMurdo hitting them and crumpling into a prone mass of muscles. Right. Analysis: successful.

The crowd goes silent. One lone, very annoyed voice, cries out: “Where’d that come from, then?”

Matt picks up her handkerchief and shakes it out. She’ll want it back when she inevitably comes to call. He walks to the bookie, takes his earnings, slaps one note to the counter and fishes out a bottle of not-entirely-terrible-whiskey from where its hidden. 

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur.

* * *

Matt awakens to the unmistakable sound of a spoon carefully cracking the shell of a boiled egg. He’s under what must be a several thousand pounds worth of furs on the floor of his apartment. The carpet under his cheek is slightly damp from where he’s been drooling on it. The air is full of her scent: juniper and something spiced. He rolls over.

“London is so bleak this time of year,” Allura says from her seat in his window nook. “Not that I’m pining for Budapest, mind you. I quite like to travel during the winter.”

She unspools herself in a gorgeous sprawl of long limbs encased in fashionable silk. “I brought these for you.” Allura places a little basket of walnuts before him. Matt hauls himself into a sloppy cross-legged seat and tries to remember where he’s put her blasted handkerchief. “All the way from Syria.” She beams at him as he plucks a walnut from the bowl and crushes it with one hand. “I found these _exquisite_ dates from the Jordan.” She stands to fuss with a pot of tea. The smell of rosehips and something he doesn’t quite recognize fills the air. “And your favorite! Olives, from the Cyclades.”

He watches with heat filling his low belly as she pops one between her deep red lips. She cocks her head at him.

“I found a file with my name on it while you were sleeping.”

“You were watching me sleep?” Matt finds he’s dressed in fresh pants—now sleep rumpled—that he doesn’t remember putting on and no shirt. His dressing gown is also missing in action. “You have bad hobbies.”

Allura laughs. “Says the man who keeps files on his friends.”

“That is not the word that I would use to describe us.”

She cocks an eyebrow at him as a slow, sly smile curves her lips. “Oh?”

Matt says nothing as he staggers upright. He wraps a fur around his shoulders and staggers over to her, intent on pulling his file from her dainty hands. She bops him with it when he tries.

“The theft of Velazquez portrait from King of Spain,” Allura recites as she flounces away from him. Matt staggers after her, nearly tripping over the stuffed artist’s rendition of a unicorn and braining himself. Allura catches him with one hand and continues to read. “Missing naval documents lead to resignation of Bulgarian prime minister. Ah! Scandalous affair end engagement of Hapsburg Prince to Romanov Princess.”

Matt manages to wrestle the file from her. She ends up tangled in his arms under the fur. Her grin is devilish. 

“You realize,” she says right against his lips, “none of those articles mention my name?”

“And yet,” he whispers back, “your signature was unmistakable.”

She giggles and he kisses her because he can. 

Matt would, very much, like to continue kissing her because she’s warm and sweet and _here_ after so long apart, but he remembers something rather important, critical even, about her person.

“And where is your doting husband?” He asks. When her eyelashes dip a dreadful chill walks itself down his spin. “Oh no,” he sighs. He bundles them into a low settee. “Allura.”

“There was a reason for the Compromise,” she whispers against his collarbones. “The uprisings,” her voice hitches, “well. You know how popular uprisings tend to go.”

“Lance was a _poet_ ,” Matt says, feeling wretched. “What was he doing—"

“He loved the city,” Allura interrupts. “He was a fighter in his own way. And now I am Allura Altea once again.”

“ _Nemzeti Dal_ ,” Matt says against her hair as she tucks herself closer. “That was his?”

Allura nods, small and miserable. “They shot him for it. In the street like a dog.” Matt tightens his arms around her. He can see the scene play out clearly. The young, impetuous patriot declaiming his poem to the people as the rifleman readies his gun. “They wouldn’t even let me collect his body until the sun had set.”

Until she would no longer be able to sing his soul back into his body. 

“I’m so sorry, Allura.” He lets her curl into his arms and pretends he doesn’t feel the tears against his skin. “I,” his voice fails him for a moment. “I loved the city, too.”

It’s a small, pathetic thing to say in the face of her (his) terrible grief. A shallow thing to summarize a long, golden summer of laughter. They lay like that, tangled together like children hiding from a monster, for a long, long time.

* * *

He awakes, with a jolt, to Shiro standing over him with a disapproving glower and a lady’s coin purse sitting on his mantle board.

“What I want to know is,” Shiro says as Matt fights to untangle himself from the heavy duvet pinning him to the couch, “why the only woman you have ever loved is a master criminal. Are you a masochist?”

“I can explain.”

“I already have my explanation,” Shiro says as he yanks the duvet off and shakes it out. Matt shivers in the sudden chill. “It’s because she’s the only person who has ever beaten you at your own game. Twice.” Shiro suddenly grins, heart breaking in its beauty. “Made you look like a proper idiot.”

“If you’d just let me explain.”

“What is she after?” Shiro asks as he hands over a Matt’s dressing gown. “What could she possibly need?”

“I would tell you,” Matt huffs, “if you could stop mocking me for longer than three breaths.”

They glare at each other until Shiro drops onto the couch with a grin. He flings one of the furs over Matt’s shoulders. “An alibi? A beard? A human canoe?” Matt slouches into the furs and resigns himself to waiting until Shiro is quite finished having his fun. “She could sit on your back and row you up the Thames.”

“Are you quite finished?”

Shiro waves an envelop at him. “She left you something.” He snatches it out Matt’s grasp at the last minute like an absolute child. “I’ve already read it. She’s looking for a missing person.”

“Yes. I _know_ that much.”

“One William Burke, formerly of Urney, County Tyrone. Blond, blue eyed, and hung for murder over forty years ago.” Shiro lets Matt snatch the letters back. “There’s your problem. She’s not into you. You’re not a corpse.”

“She’s not looking for his actual body,” Matt says primly. “She’s looking for a link to his immortal soul.”

Shiro’s expression twists. “Like a phylactery?”

“Almost exactly like.”

“All right,” Shiro sighs. “Please explain what your girl has gotten herself wrapped up in and please tell me it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.”

Matt grimaces.

“Oh,” Shiro says faintly. “It’s worse. Grand.”


	2. my mind rebels at stagnation

“So,” Shiro says as he settles back into the couch like a man fully prepared to take his extended leisure. His jacket is off. His tie a messy tangle of silk undone around his throat. His shirt sleeves rolled to show off his impressively sculpted forearms. 

Matt, until he’d met Captain Takashi Shirogane of Her Majesty’s Airforce, hadn’t thought it possible to get sculpted forearms, but Shiro exists to defy explanation. Shiro grins at him. His teeth are very white against his tanned skin. He looks positively rakish and Matthew wonders idly if Shiro’s dearly beloved betrothed knew precisely how rakish his intended could be. He hopes not. It’s a secret he’d rather like to hoard to himself like dragon’s gold.

He fusses about with the random mess of things Allura’d left him in her whirlwind appearance and then disappearance. Within the crates and boxes that she’d ordered totted up to his rooms—on his expense, naturally—he expects to find a particular little present.

“So?” He echoes back to Shiro, who merely smirks at him. 

Shiro spreads his hands before him as he props one foot up on a battered low table that Matt is almost entirely certain has been salvaged from Mr. Garrett’s rejected furniture bin. “Tell me how you divined your mad girl’s plans.”

“She’s not my girl.” Shiro’s grin grows broader and it takes Matt half a second to catch the place where he’s made an error. He scowls. “And she’s not mad.”

“You wouldn’t even recognize it if she were. You’re as mad as she is,” Shiro says without missing a beat. “So. Tell me. You love to brag.”

Matt sticks his nose in the air as he retrieves a slightly scratched fiddle from one of the crates and settles himself in his favorite chair. It’s been a while since he’s played, but the notes of “La Traviata” come to him easily enough. 

Shiro reaches across the narrow space separating their chairs and nudges his thigh with his boot. Matt plucks the descending cord with more force than it probably deserves and scowls at him. “Come on,” Shiro wheedles. “Tell me what your girl is up to. You will eventually, you know.”

“If you can be convinced to keep _silent_ through the telling,” Matt says with fastidious primness, “I suppose I can be convinced to tell you.”

“Consider it post-event analysis,” Shiro says. The smile Matt gets when he glares at his hypothetical best friend is so innocently sunny he spends a half-second contemplating the pleasure of dumping the entire teakettle over his head.

“ _If_ ,” Matt stresses while Shiro’s smile grows obnoxiously, “you can keep a civil tongue behind your teeth, I’ll tell you.”

Shiro pours himself cup of tea with a level of decorousness that’s truly trying and gestures with one hand.

“So,” Matt says slowly as he thinks how to start. “After consoling Allura in my indominable fas—”

He drops his hands from his fiddle and glowers at Shiro as he snickers. Shiro tries to smooth his face into an expression of attentiveness. Matt can feel a vein on his forehead throb. Shiro presses a hand to his mouth as if that could hide his grin. 

“I’m sorry.”

“You said you would pay attention and not editorialize.”

“I wasn’t editorializing. One needs to actually _speak_ in order to editorialize,” Shiro defends as Matt glares at him. “And besides, certain things cannot be said without you expecting certain reactions.”

“I’m not going to continue if you are going to act this way,” Matt tells him seriously. He gestures at Shiro with his fiddle bow to make his point until Shiro bats it out his face with an expressive eyeroll. 

Shiro waves his teacup at him. “I’m sorry. Continue.”

“I don’t think you’re being very sincere.”

“Matthew, I will strangle you with your own cravat if you don’t get on with it.”

Matt sniffs. “I don’t wear a cravat. I am a fashionable, modern man. I have a tie—several of them since _someone_ keeps stealing them—in a nice array of colours.” He looks archly over at Shiro, whose own tie is an unknotted mess around his throat, leaving his shirt open as if he were a Thames dockworker. Not that Matt has any problems with dockworkers. Lovely people, really. Always so willing to fetch a man out of the river after he’s had an unexpected tumble. “I would be delighted to teach you how to tie your tie, rather than leaving you to look like you’ve just stumbled out of a house of ill repute.”

Shiro gives him a smile that’s all teeth. “Matthew,” he says as sweet as sugar, “if you don’t get on with your damned story, I am going to cause you pain and not the metaphorical kind.”

“If you insist….”

* * *

_It takes Allura a while to move_ from the easy the circle of Matthew’s arms. Tear tracks have dried along her cheeks, but she feels not a single impulse to wash them away. She’s comfortable, comforted, in the safety of his embrace and she’s not felt safe in quite some time. She has the unfortunate premonition that she may never feel safe again. But there are things that need doing and Matt is only one of the many wheels she needs to set into motion. 

“I didn’t come just to bring bad news and whine for you to comfort me,” when Matt opens his mouth to dispute this characterization of events Allura taps the tip of his nose with one finger softly. His eyes go faintly crossed as he tracks the gesture. “No, no hush. You must listen to me,” she says as she sits up. Her hair spills down her shoulders, falling lose from her cascading braids in what she knows is a charming profusion of curls. “I need your help.”

“Of course,” Matt agrees from where she keeps him pinned against the couch with one hand in the middle of his chest. She enjoys for a moment the way they look together, his pale skin a pretty compliment to her own golden-brown fingers. “Naturally. What other reason would bring you to drab old London and drab little me?”

Allura sighs at him because he’s being tedious and charming in equal measure and knows it. “Oh, don’t pout,” she scolds. “It doesn’t become you.”

Matt mouths the words back to her and she smirks at him like a particularly self-satisfied cat. They sit there at an impasse until Allura swoops down to press a chaste kiss to the petulant set of Matt’s lips. He flushes prettily.

She holds out her purse, fat and heavy enough to make him interested but not so fat as to make him instantly suspicious, by its strings on one finger. “I have a job for you.”

Matt considers the purse with a skeptical look but does not deign to accept it. She has, perhaps, underestimated the strength of his suspicious streak. Bother. 

“Do you now?”

“I know how you get when you’re between cases,” she tells him sweetly with just enough bite to make him arch an eyebrow at her as he tries to hide his smile.

“I don’t get any kind of way. That insinuation is an insult upon my honor.”

“You say this as if you have any honor, but you forget that I have, in fact, met you. More to the point, I have met you after you’ve spent a long evening in Monti Carlo at the tender mercies of the casinos.”

Matt waves a hand. “I settled my debts,” he says airily, “like a man of honor.”

“You settled your debts by breaking into the casino’s safe room and setting the record books on fire.”

“But they were _settled_.” 

He’s a terrible, terrible man with a rakish smile that almost gets him out of as much trouble as it gets him into. Allura says nothing as she goes to pour the tea for them, so long forgotten that it’s gone cold. She waves Matt off when he moves like he’s going to remove it to the little heating device. She taps it with one finger, carefully agitating the atoms until it steams gently. Matt harrumphs at her like an old man but doesn’t stop her for all she knows he hates it when she ‘shows off’ using her command of etheric forces. It isn’t _scientific_ , the way Allura sings the forces into being, and he hates it. 

Allura offers him a cup. (She is, perhaps, a very bad person for how much she loves to unsettle him in little ways that he can’t easily protest.) He scowls at it as if it is likely to bite him. 

She takes a long sip and eyes him over the top of her cup. 

He sniffs it with great suspicion before taking a sip. 

“When will you stop treating everything I do with such suspicion?” She asks with a sigh. “It’s the kind of thing that might hurt a girl’s feelings. Truly.”

“How fortuitous is it, then, that you are neither a girl nor are your feelings particularly hurt?” Matt responds with that sly, rakish smile. “We both know you take any and all suspicion thrown your way as a mark of good regard.”

Allura flutters her lashes at him. “You do so know how to flatter me.”

He gives her a charming little bow over his teacup. “I have had a long acquaintance with your weaknesses.”

She flutters her lashes again. “Oh, Mr. Holt, _oh_.”

“Incorrigible wench.”

She thinks about telling him that it takes one to know one, but she feels that might be a little childish under current circumstances. She gives him a winsome smile instead. “I need you to find someone for me.”

He gives her a narrow look.

“Really,” she sighs. “You think I was asking you to kidna— _oh_ ,” she feigns a startled gasp when he grabs her hand as she slides it into her bodice. “Really, Matthew?”

“One cannot be too careful when it comes to you,” he says with his eyes locked on her décolletage. Under other circumstance, this would be flattering. As it is, she can’t help the sigh that rattles out of her, world weary and very put upon. 

She pulls an envelope out from between her breasts and tilts it towards him with two fingers. It smells of her perfume—juniper berries and spices—and the scent particular to her skin. She can see the moment it catches his attention. “Be very careful,” she whispers to him as he, entirely unaware she’s certain, pulls her closer to himself, “to not to cut yourself upon this _very_ dangerous envelop.”

He settles back and doesn’t take it.

Allura drops the envelope on the table between them with careful precision. She can feel Matthew’s eyes track it all unwilling. She has him. Curiosity will always be his besetting sin. 

“You can take your purse,” he says when she drops that on the table next to the envelope. “I didn’t say I’d take the case.”

She smiles at him. “Consider it a wager then,” she says, sweet as honey with a smile that shows all her teeth. “That your curiosity will get the better of you in the end.”

“Who are you working for?”

Allura can’t help the way her eyes roll. Sometimes he is entirely too predictable. It’s charming, in a way, but also tedious.

“So. I’ll have to find out the hard way.”

She pats his cheek as she stands. “Give my love to Shiro, won’t you?”

“He’s to be married, you know,” Matt says. She doesn’t think he realizes exactly how petulant he sounds. “He’s not helping me on cases any longer. That one on Kerberos high street with the Galra was the last. If you want to give him your regards, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

The fact that he sounds as if he actually believes that would be tragic and very likely painful for him—and she imagines that Matthew _does_ see himself as the Byronic figure in this little drama of his own making—except for the fact that she knows these two boys and the way they are about each other. They will never—fiancés and politics and all the king’s countrymen be damned—be done with each other. Not truly. But he’ll take anything she says upon the situation ill. She knows that from the petulant tone of his voice, the dejected slump of his shoulders, the way he refuses to look in her eyes. He is the picture of heartbreak and she hasn’t the heart to interrupt him.

Matt doesn’t flinch when she moves around the table, careful of her bustle, to buss his cheek. 

“You remember the Grand?” 

Matt rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything. He fiddles with his teacup like he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. She can see the way he struggles not to say anything, to not give himself away, and it _delights_ her. It is very likely that she is not a good person.

“They gave me our old room.”

Matt hums his acknowledgement. Allura pauses for a moment. She’s loathe to ruin their moment, but some things ought to be said.

She drops a light hand onto his shoulder, and he goes very still. 

“Lance,” she swallows hard at the way her throat wants to seize up around that name. Months later and it still chokes her into near silence. “Left you some things. The fiddle. A few books. That one painting of his that you always liked, you know the one. I’ll have them sent up.”

“On my account, of course.”

Allura thinks he means to sound sarcastic, a little dig at the way she delights in leaving him with the bill on their little adventures (so handy when she doesn’t want a paper trail), but it comes out too soft and too sincere for that.

“Of course.”

She pats his shoulder, quick and perfunctory, and turns her portrait back around as she leaves his rooms.

She pauses outside his door for just a moment—just to hear him crash through his apartment on some mad dash to slap together a disguise—and grins. The stairs creak noisily as she descends the stairs with a deliberately slow and heavy tread.

“Oh!” Hunk Garrett blinks owlishly up at her from the landing. 

She smiles at him and steals a little scone off the breakfast tray that is almost certainly headed for Matthew. It’s half past eleven o’clock in the morning and only now is Hunk endeavoring to coax Matt towards wakefulness and pretending to be a member of Society. Really, Mathew is so lucky he’s found people who understand him so well. 

“Thank you, Mr. Garrett,” she chirps cheerfully before she bites off a dainty bit of the scone. Hunk blushes charmingly when she sidles past him, just a touch too close to be polite, and _definitely_ far closer than she needs to be on the wide landing of the stairs. She steals another biscuit. “These are very good. Highlight of my visits.”

“Of course, Miss…?”

Allura leaves him staring after her, not deigning to give him an answer. Either he’ll figure it out or he won’t. There’s another crash, one that makes Hunk jump, that sounds very like Matt throwing open a window. She hums to herself in self-satisfaction as she continues down the stairs, a little quicker this time.

“Hold the door,” she sings out as Takashi Shirogane comes striding in, knocking ash off his hat. Honestly, London is such a filthy city. She doesn’t know how anyone stands it.

Shirogane holds the door with a sweet bow, his hat pressed to chest. Their eyes meet for just a moment and she can see the second that he thinks _what the …_ , but she’s already through the door and down the little steps leading up to their flats. The crowd swirls around her like the tide and she lets it pull her along as if she were nothing more than a bit of seafoam on a swift moving tide. 

Very, very faintly in the distance she can hear a shout of ‘Hi-yah!’ and the exasperated tones of one Dr. Shirogane, respected physician to the honorably retired military men of Her Majesty’s Airforce, yell: “Gods _damn_ it, Matthew.”

Allura bites her lip to keep from grinning. She does _so_ like being right about these kinds of things. 

The crowd churns and paces around her until she fetches up in one of the little bazaars that London so loves to populate its little side streets with. Hawkers of all kinds call out to her, spinning fantastic lies about their wares, and she smiles at each one as they bow and smirk and try to tell her that their bits of fool’s gold and slight-of-hand are actually the Maharajah’s lost jewels. 

(She knows they aren’t the Maharajah’s jewels. She stole those herself three years back and had a wonderful little row with Matthew about it when he couldn’t prove a thing even though they both knew she’d left just _enough_ clues that he’d know no one else could have possibly done it but her. Tiny, tiny little clues that he’d immediately put together like a child weaving together their first lie. Matthew really _is_ her favorite.) 

Allura keeps one ear cocked for the particular sounds of Matthew making his inelegant way through the crowd. It takes a little longer than she’d expected—Shiro must not have been inclined to be helpful—but eventually she hears the tell-tale “here, watch yourself then!” that signals she’s got a less adept tail than he thinks he is following her far too closely. 

She turns down a side street. 

She’s immediately set upon by a large man who is, unfortunately for him, not particularly observant. He leans into her space, leering, and she flutters her eyelashes at him. This, she decides, will be educational for everyone. 

“Got some flowers for ya, sweetheart,” he slurs. He looks her up and down, one lazy and insolent sweep of his eyes, before smiling a crooked smile he probably thinks is rakish but really just shows off one broken tooth and a terrible case of halitosis. “I’ll cut you a deal, because you’re so pretty.”

He does, in fact, actually have a bouquet of roses that he holds limply in one hand. They are very pretty. Blooming red and vibrant in a way that suggests a little quintessence manipulation spell had been cast over them. Her benefactor, Allura thinks, might be interested in them.

“Oh!” She gasps with a widening smile. “My lucky day!”

The man is an _idiot_ , because he holds the bouquet lower, clearly trying to get her to come into range of his compatriot. She flutters her eyelashes coquettishly and obliges.

“Hello, gorgeous,” his compatriot growls low in his throat, terribly close to her ear like she’s supposed to be intimidated by his nearness. “You got something for me?”

She lets herself smile with all her teeth for a moment before trigging the spring loaded little weighted jack she keeps in her skirts for times like these. Using the force of her turn, she strikes the man behind her hard enough to bounce him off the far wall of the alley. He clutches the side of his face, groaning, blood seeping between his fingers. 

He’s lucky she’s let him keep his eye.

She spins again, skirts swirling, and slices right through the first man’s waistcoat, letting his gut spill free. It’s a nice little warning and, with any luck, it’ll relieve him of that truly horrendous fashion choice. Allura bustles him against the other wall with the knife tight to his face, point right below his eye, and one hand over his mouth.

“Don’t move,” she snarls as she crowds him in. 

She delicately moves her knife to his throat, pressing against his Adam’s apple in a move that’s more show than actual threat.

“Now what have we here?” She wonders as she carefully peels back his heavy coat. His wallet sits fat and heavy in his inner breast pocket. “Oh!” She gasps and blinks up at him with a coy smile. They are so close she knows all he can smell is the scent of her spiced perfume. “For me?” She asks as she deftly relieves him of his burden. “You shouldn’t have.”

He scuttles away from her like a wounded bird before a large, mean cat when she releases him. She takes a pointed sniff of the flowers as she tucks the wallet away into her skirts. 

She loves Matt _so_ much when he doesn’t make a single move to intervene, not once, from where he thinks he’s hidden himself behind some rusting bird cages stacked outside a back entrance. She hears, very faintly, “ _that’s_ my girl.”

She lets herself smile into the roses and puts a bit more sashay into her step as she saunters out of the alley and towards the carriage waiting for her.

It’s black, understated in the way that only the very, _very_ rich can obtain, and faintly ominous as it lurks at the curbside. She pauses for a moment to pet the velvet noses of the horses. Their driver smiles down at her, indulgent, as they lip at her fingers. It’s artifice, of course, just buying time to let Matthew get in close enough to get a good view of the cab and the horses and the driver’s flaming red hair.

“So?” her employer rasps as Allura hauls herself into the cab.

“He’ll take it,” she says. She offers the flowers, feeling almost shy. Something small and distressingly girlish thrills inside her breast when her employer takes them. “I would wager he’ll find our man inside the week.”

“Well done, Ms. Altea,” Haggar praises in that low, husky voice. “This is precisely why I hired you.” Haggar settles back against the seat cushions looking nothing so much as like a self-satisfied crow. “Burke was crucial to Knox’s research. I must know…” Allura contrives to look only mildly disappointed when Haggar peters off. “I must know.”

There’s a thump against the cab door and their driver’s sudden swearing. 

Allura makes her eyes go very wide. It’s not, actually, much of an act. She’d expected Matthew to follow her, because of course he would, but she hadn’t expected that he’d go and make himself a target by getting up close and personal with Haggar.

Haggar huddles farther into her cloak and the seat cushions until her face is entirely obscured in shadows, but Allura can see the twinkle of malicious pleasure in her pale golden eyes. Haggar so does like getting the better of clever people. Which is why Allura’d hoped she and Matthew would never, ever come into contact with one another.

“Get on with you,” shouts their driver. “Scalp diver!”

There’s another thump as Matt all but climbs into their window. The thing that strikes her first is Matt’s truly terrible disguise. It’s cheap and overdone and clearly thrown together on the fly as he’d followed through the side streets and little bazaars. She thinks he’s wearing a false nose and has, perhaps, fallen headfirst into a coalbin at some point.

“A little rifle range could go a long way, sir,” Matt rasps in a passable mimicry of a North Londoner’s accent, “rubbing the calluses off these German bands.”

Allura closes her eyes. It’s not the worst ruse to try to get a glimpse at her benefactor, but it is definitely not one of his better plans.

Haggar’s reply is prompt. Where Allura has a little spring-loaded jackknife, a sleek and deadly bit of business, Haggar keeps a lethal little flintlock pistol spring-loaded into the heavy sleeves of her outer cloak. Matt’s hands fly up like startled birds when it appears in his face as if by magic. Haggar says nothing, moves not an inch, as the little blade under the pistol hovers about two inches from Matt’s right eye. Allura thinks she may have forgotten entirely how to breathe.

“God save the queen, ma’am,” Matt mumbles as he stumbles back from the carriage door. She thinks his eyes slide to hers in a millisecond quick wink. The _shameless_ man. “God save the queen.”

Allura watches as he stumbles away, every inch of him a drunk North Londoner fallen upon hard times after the wars. Haggar relaxes again against the carriage cushions, like a raven resettling its feathers. Silence falls between them, heavy and almost oppressive, as Allura wonders if Haggar is going to say something. There is not a chance in hell that it escaped Haggar that their accoster was one Sir Matthew Holt, Protector of the Crown, in a truly atrocious disguise.

But the silence continues between them. It stretches like slowly cooling tar, foul and tacky with all the conversational gambits she might try.

Then it occurs to her that Haggar is waiting for her to make some comment, to start the little conversational game of chess between them. Sometimes, however, the best move is not to play.

“I hope you like the flowers,” she says with a sweet smile.

Haggar holds the bouquet to her face and inhales deeply. “Oh,” she says with a low purr. “I do, Ms. Altea, I do.”

* * *

Matt ends his retelling with a dramatic little flourish on the fiddle. 

“I,” Shiro starts for a moment before his voice trails off in a sad little hum of confusion. “And you. Hm.” His hand flutters up to his mouth for a moment as he considers Matt with a worried little frown. Matt keeps his face carefully neutral. He tries not to influence Shiro too much during times like these. He likes to get Shiro’s unvarnished perspective. Sometimes. On occasion. Shiro studies him for a little longer before sighing long and heavy, as if utterly exhausted. “There’s something worse, isn’t there?”

“I am entirely certain,” Matt says in his most academic tone. “That her current employer is none other than Honerva Rabe.” He makes a little gesture towards his shirt. “There was a bit chalk, you see, on her very nice cloak.”

“From a bit of _chalk_.”

“Well, and the fact that I could see a bit of the seal for the House of Zarkon on an envelope tucked into the seat cushions of the carriage. A House which,” Matt plays a quick little jig in a minor cord making Shiro wince at the uncanniness of the song in the discordant key, “currently has one professor Honevra Rabe in its employment.”

Shiro tugs at the messy remains of what had once been a rather nice Windsor knot tied around his throat—Keith must have done it for him, there is no universe in which Takashi Shirogane is capable of tying his tie in anything other than the sloppiest of knots that don’t even deserve the name—and frowns. He’s sprawled across Matt’s low couch, tea utterly forgotten, as he slots together the bits of the puzzle pieces Matt has dropped in his metaphorical lap. Not, of course, that Shiro has all of the pieces quite yet. There’s no sense in spoiling him.

“Your logic still seems a bit … attenuated,” Shiro announces.

Matt hums in what could be considered an agreeing manner and plays a bit of the willow song from Verdi’s _Otello_ and Shiro makes a face at him. 

“I’m not seeing the wronged damsel in this,” Shiro tells him. “Unless, Allura…?”

Matt snorts.

“Right,” Shiro says. He lolls his head, the picture of petulance, and then nudges Matt’s thigh with his boot again. “Tell me what bit of City gossip I’m missing, because you know I don’t pay attention to any of that.”

“And yet your nose is always in a paper,” Matt says as he continues to play the song. It’s a slow, sad sweep of music meant to accompany a soprano’s glorious aria as Desdemona laments her fate—distrusted by her lover, in fear for her life, with no allies but a young, untried girl who has no more power than Desdemona herself. He rather hopes the current circumstances, given the parties involved, are not so dire.

“ _Salce, Salce, Salce, Cantiamo, il Salce funebresarà la mia ghirlanda_ ,” Shiro sings, his deep baritone roughly a million octaves too low for Desdemona’s mourning song, but lovely, nonetheless. 

Matt taps his chin with his bow. “I didn’t take you for a castrato.”

Shiro throws a book at him. 

Matt catches it one handed. “Honevra Rabe,” he muses. “The City’s most famous spinster. The _Times_ spills at least a small lake’s worth of ink over her comings and goings every Season. Never once linked to a single House or Family besides her own—a small holding of middling stock and modest fortune—until the Lord Zarkon, Baron of Scarsdale, Lord of Kedleston Hall, managed to entice her into his employ. Only for him to be found dead, drowned in one of his own pools, not but half a year later and leaving to the good professor the Balbardie House in northern Scotland, too which she promptly retired and has not been seen since.”

“Ah,” Shiro sighs. “I do remember that. Left it to her over the objection of the Lord’s eldest son. What was his name again?”

“Lotor,” Matt supplies. “Yes, he was … disproportionately put out by the diminishment of his inheritance by one run down, Scottish estate and has since flounced off to the Continent.”

“You think they are lovers?”

“The son and the professor?”

Shiro throws a different book at him.

Matt catches that one to and sets it on top of its cousin. “Stop mishandling my books, you philistine,” he chides while Shiro makes faces at him. “And it’s a legitimate question, given the way the little lordling followed the professor around like an imprinted duckling.”

“A duckling with teeth,” Shiro observes. “Lotor all but drove her from the City after the will was read.”

“But not,” Matt notes, punctuating his words with a waggle of his bow, “from the either Academy or from the Balbardie House.”

Shiro considers him and then narrows his eyes. “There’s something important about that particular estate, isn’t there?”

Matt gives him a sunny smile that is only a little brittle around the edges. “It sits, in fact, very near the last known laboratories of one Richard Knox, thaumaturge in the service of Her Majesty’s Royal Military.”

Shiro begins to swear.

* * *

They break long enough for Hunk to come in with a breakfast tray—though the day has long move past even brunch hours and is quickly approaching early supper, a thing their proprietor is quick to point out—and the pause does nothing to settle the seething tension roil around Shiro’s stomach. Not even the little crumbly scone that are Hunk’s particular specialty does anything for his nerves.

Matthew is, infuriatingly, as calm and placid as a mountain lake. About as remote as well, given the distracted way he only vaguely complains about Hunk’s bi-weekly attempt to wrangle his apartments into some semblance of order. 

Hunk throws open windows, reorganizes Matthew’s correspondence, shakes out forgotten blankets left strewn in random places, and collects various articles of clothing from where Matt has left them to wrinkle without any serious objection from Matt. It is only when Hunk attempts to remove a stack of teacups from where they had been growing an interesting collection of molds that Matt manages to rouse himself from whatever pit of rumination he’d thrown himself down.

“I was experimenting with that,” Matt complains but makes no motion to stop Hunk.

“With what?” Hunk snaps. “Concocting a new form of biological warfare to set loose on London? Hasn’t the city suffered enough because of you?”

“I’m a Protector of the Crown?” Matt says with question marks nearly visible around every word.

Hunk stops mid-cleaning, turns slowly on one heel—giving every impression of a large ship making a very tight turn in a very small harbor—and pins Matt with a look that has him squirming like a schoolboy caught in a prank. “I will note that being a Protector of the Crown, God save the Queen,” Hunk says slowly, “is not the same as being a protector of the city.”

“True,” Shiro notes from the couch Hunk had shoved him into while making obliquely insulting comments about the abilities of military men to keep things neat and tidy being gross exaggerations. “The two seem to be directly opposed half the time, if the sheer property damage you inflict upon it near quarterly is anything to go by.”

Matt makes rude faces at him from across the coffee table while Hunk nods in agreement.

“See! It’s like you _delight_ in causing as much collateral damage as possible.” Hunk sets the entire stack of sad little teacups on his tray before surveying the rest of Matt’s chambers. “How you manage to live in the middle of all this chaos boggles the mind. Really, I should just quarantine the entire floor and fumigate.”

Matt makes a small noise of protest in the back of his throat.

“Oh! That reminds me.” Shiro and Matt blink at each other, caught off guard by the apparent topic shift. “Who was the lady who came to call yesterday morning? She sent a bottle of that cognac from La Rochelle and I want to send a thank you.” He shoots Matt a pointed look that has the celebrated detective curling into a defensive slouch. “Some of us have manners.”

“I have manners.”

Hunk makes a disbelieving noise. “A feral cat also has manners. Bad ones.”

Matt presses a hand to chest and sinks even further into the faded velvet of his favorite armchair. “You malign me!”

Shiro is continuously impressed by the grace with which Hunk Garret can move when he puts his mind to it. The way he hauls his tray up without a single delicate bit of china on it even so much of giving whisper of sound is a testament to the hidden depths of the man. Hunk sets the tray against his hip and glowers imperiously down at Matt who contrives to look cowed. It is not convincing. 

Of course, Matthew would not recognize the concept of shame if painted itself blue and bit him. He’d only complain about abstract concept chewing on his derriere. Shiro blinks at himself and the odd turn his thoughts had taken. Years of being in close proximity with one Matthew Holt has, apparently, taken their toll upon his otherwise perfectly sensible mental faculties. 

“Your own actions malign you, denigrate,” Hunk says with a sniff, but Shiro doesn’t miss the way he surreptitiously drops another packet of the little biscuits they both know Matt loves near Matt’s most recent research pile. “The laundress will be by in the morning to collect your shirts and if you cause her to faint because of your licentiousness again I’ll hang _you_ from a line.”

“It’s not my fault that the general stock of laundresses has declined to far that—I’ll be good!” Matt yelps when Hunk hefts his tray meaningfully. “I’ll be good.”

Hunk makes his way out grumbling under his breath about mad inventors that weren’t worth their rent.

Matt watches him go with a complicated expression. “Do you think he realizes I can hear him?”

“I think you are meant to,” Shiro observes dryly. “Well done on distracting him from Allura, by the way. Don’t think I didn’t notice that.”

Matt hums. Once again, a distant, distracted air settles around him like a cloak. 

“Wouldn’t do to have him get mixed up in this,” Matt murmurs. Shiro wonders if Matt is aware of the way his eyes have locked onto some horizon that only he can see or the way a small, unhappy frown mars his brow. For a moment he’s struck by the sudden, inexplicable desire to smooth away that distressed furrow. Shiro sits on his hands. Matt continues on as if he hasn’t noticed which, Shiro reflects, he probably hasn’t. He never does. “Hunk is a good man, a gentle one, and he has no place in the kinds of games people like Honerva Rabe like to play.”

“You seem very certain that the esteemed professor is at the heart of this case.”

Matt nods absently, as if he only half heard Shiro. “The pieces are very … tidily arranged that way, aren’t they?”

And there is nothing in the world, at all, that Matt distrusts quite as much as tidiness. In his cases, in his rooms, in his life. The man is a creature sustained through a sort of directed chaos that Shiro finds he both loathes and yet is endlessly entranced by. He grimaces. “Grand. You’re already having second thoughts. How can having one eccentric playing the kinds of games your mad girl so loves, a morbid collection of limbs arranged like a little girl, the scandal of the Season all tied to one of the most controversial pieces of legislation before the House of Commons not be messy enough for you? What’s next? Invasion by the Bolshevik army?”

“Wasn’t Lord Lotor spending his time on the Continent at La Rochelle?” Matt asks with his head tilted to the side, utterly ignoring Shiro’s outburst. “Or perhaps Cognac itself. I wonder….” 

“One day I shall learn to stop testing fate by asking how things could possibly get worse when it comes to you,” Shiro says as he resists the urge to fist his hands in his own hair. This seems to rouse Matt out of his odd fit of melancholy, and he tosses Shiro an amused look, as if Shiro’s done something cute. “Clearly, it is your own particular and perverse talent to find the absolute most ridiculous plots within which to insert yourself.”

“I will point out that in both cases with which we currently find ourselves occupied I was called forth by forces beyond my control,” Matt makes a grand gesture with the fiddle bow before Shiro slaps it away from his face. Matt gives him big, innocent eyes that Shiro knows to distrust. “How could I possibly turn away an earnest lad or a damsel in distress who come to me?”

Shiro rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he might’ve strained something. 

“Do you actually listen to the things that come out of your mouth,” he demands.

Matt cocks his head to the side, hair spilling down his shoulders, how he hasn’t gotten it tangled around either his bow or the fiddle, Shiro does not know. 

“Sometimes,” Matt allows. 

Shiro says something unpleasant about Matt’s lineage that just makes him laugh, high and charming. 

Of course Matt would go and let Allura tangle him up in something that involves not only the Peerage, but one of the biggest scandals the House of Lords has seen since Lord Thace had up and declared himself of a devotee of some ascetic religion from the Orient and locked himself in seclusion in his country estates. Really, it seems to be the current fashion of the Peerage to find themselves some foreign, and thus mystical, creed to dedicate themselves to with great fervor.

It’s enough to put a man off the entire religion business entirely.

Shiro throws himself off the couch so he can pace. It’s always easier to think through the messes that Matt seems to delight in getting them embroiled in when he can move. Matt makes no gesture to stop him, probably long since desensitized to Shiro stomping a circuit up and then down the length of their apartments.

Matt idly strums a battered fiddle that Shiro strongly suspects needs tuning as Shiro paces the long isle between Matthew’s various experiments and projects. Some of them bubble with an ominous intent. Shiro’s not entirely certain when Matt’s learned to play it. He thinks he ought to feel a bit resentful that Matt has chosen now of all times to demonstrate this particular skill, but the sudden musical accompaniment to his outrage is, oddly, soothing. 

“So, you are taking Allura’s case.”

Matt tips his head to the side. He’s abandoned the bow in favor of plucking the strings of his fiddle with nimble fingers. It takes Shiro a moment, but he recognizes the children’s song “Lemons and Oranges.” He considers throwing another book.

Just when Shiro’s starting to select his ammunition, Matt sighs. “I don’t think I have much choice,” he says. “Do you?”

“You think she knows about the creature you found?” Shiro asks. He puts the book down. Matt quirks an eyebrow at him.

“Perhaps?” Matt shrugs. It’s an elegant roll of his shoulders. “She’s friends, as much as it terrifies me to say, with Romelle. She’s probably heard of events by now.”

Shiro thinks a number of uncharitable things about both young women that he immediately regrets. It’s not their fault that Matt is pathologically incapable of going about things in straightforward manner. 

Nor, Shiro reflects, could Allura. It makes them a matched set.

“The two of you are alarmingly well suited for each other,” Shiro announces. Matt raises one shoulder in what he probably means to be a diffident gesture, but Shiro knows him altogether too well. He throws the book in his hand.

Matt plucks it out of the air neatly and frowns at him. “Please stop rearranging my library.”

“ _Your_ library,” Shiro echoes, incensed. “Nearly two thirds of the medical texts are mine and you know it.”

Matt purses his lips before shaking his head slowly. “No, no I don’t think I know that. Possession is, after all, nine-tenths of the law.”

“No, it’s bloody well not, and you know it,” Shiro growls at him. “And stop trying to change the topic.”

“Stop making it so easy.” Matt makes a little twiddling gesture with his fingers, expressing what, exactly, Shiro cannot guess. “All I have to do is throw some out some shiny bits of conversation and off you go tearing after them like hound that’s caught the scent of a hare.” He mimes praising a hound in big, expressive gestures. “Did you get the scent, boy? Which wild conversational rabbit hole will you spring down next?”

“If you want me to go about helping you with this … mess, you aren’t making a very good case for yourself,” Shiro says as he slumps against the mantel. He catches Allura’s dainty purse up with one hand and tosses it to Matt gently. 

Matt doesn’t catch it. Just lets it hit him in the shoulder and then frowns at it as if it had done him a great personal offense.

“You may as well take it,” Shiro says lightly. Matt always did get odd about accepting funds from Allura. It’s generally best not to directly confront him on said oddness as Matthew could be like a badger cornered in his den when forced to deal with his emotions in any sort of mature fashion. “You know you’re going to go tearing after this ghost of hers.”

“I don’t know any such thing,” Matt retorts, but it comes out stiff. Stilted.

“And it’s not as if the other matter is going to pay the rent,” Shiro continues as if Matt hadn’t interrupted.

“Yes,” Matt says in that slow drawl that is him at his most obnoxious. “I suppose I _do_ have the rent to worry about all on my own, don’t I?”

Shiro throws one of his old medical textbooks at him. “Don’t be absurd.”

“You don’t have to be involved in this investigation, Shiro,” Matt says with an affected gentleness that has Shiro grinding his teeth in wordless frustration. “You are, after all, soon to be a married man and your charming fiancé does not strike me as the sort of young man who would tolerate his husband being mixed up in questionable,” Matt pauses and plucks a few more cords seemingly at random, “ _shenanigans_.”

“Don’t bring Keith into this.”

“Of course not.”

“He’s not the jealous sort.”

Matt makes a noncommittal sort of sound. His fingers trip lightly over the haunting tunes of “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio” from Verdi’s most recent opera. 

“It’s a thing that you might learn for yourself if you’d bother to spend more than five minutes in his presence,” Shiro grouses. Matt rolls his eyes. This is an argument they’ve been having the entire length of his engagement to Keith and he rather doubts they are going to resolve it this evening. He changes tactics. “Were you even going to tell me your mad girl was back in the city or were you simply going to let me discover this fact for myself?”

“You did discover it for yourself. It’s not as if she hid herself from you.”

No, Shiro supposes, she did not. Mere swirled past Hunk and himself in a cloud of juniper spiced perfume, silver-white hair and that damnedly charming smile that gets him into trouble every single time she’s in the same locality as Matt for longer than an hour. He has a thought—a wonderful, horrible thought.

“Do you think she’d like to meet Keith?” Shiro wonders aloud. “Since you refuse.”

Matt fumbles his fiddle and then stares at him in mute horror. “Why, in the name of every merciful god, would you suggest such a thing?”

Shiro shrugs. “She’s an excellent conversationalist,” he notes while Matt continues to regard him as if he has completely lost his faculties. “I think they’d enjoy each other’s company, don’t you?”

“This is crass manipulation, Shirogane,” Matt declares as he waggles his fiddle bow in what he clearly thinks is a reproving manner. “It’s unbecoming of you. Stop this instant.”

“She’s staying at the Grand, isn’t she?” Shiro continues as if he can’t hear Matt’s choked protestation. “Of course, she is. Where else would she stay? Your favorite suite? Excellent!” He beams at Matt’s impression of a beached trout. “I’ll send ‘round a dinner invitation. I rather doubt _she_ will be so déclassé as to stand us up at the Royale.”

“A little girl had been murdered. Several little girls in fact!” Matt looks so affronted that Shiro has to chew his cheek to keep from laughing straight in his best friend’s face. “Those are extenuating circumstances! You _know_ that.”

“I’m not sure that I do, in fact,” Shiro states in perfect mimicry of Matt’s disaffected tone. Matt glowers at him. “Other dining partners manage to attend dinner without finding horrifying corpses on riverbanks. It’s like you do it out of spite.”

“I refuse to acknowledge any of your ridiculousness.”

“And yet, you just did.”

Matt flings one his medical tomes back at Shiro with a vicious scowl. Shiro neat plucks it out of the air and tucks it gently onto its proper shelf. “Careful with the books, you philistine,” he repeats in mocking mimicry.

“ _Ugh_.”

Shiro laughs for a little longer before sobering. He and Matt consider each other for a long, long moment. They’ve known each other for so long that Shiro likes to think no one knows the difficult, half-feral genius better than he does. Knows the ins and outs of his mercurial temper and sudden shifts of his incisive, vicious intellect. He sees the precise moment when Matthew’s mood takes a turn back towards the melancholic and yet can see no way to prevent it. 

“I think she’s intimidated,” Matt says out of nowhere at all. There might be logical steps leading a mind from conversational point A to the conversation point that Matthew has arrived at, but the gentle gods know that Shiro can’t see them. “I think she’s afraid.”

That draws Shiro up short. “What? Allura? Or this professor?”

Matt lays his fiddle across his knees and rubs at his mouth. The worried furrow between his eyes makes another appearance, and again Shiro wishes he could smooth it away. It’s such a reoccurring impulse that he doesn’t think he’ll ever quite be over it.

“She was shaken when I, ah, inserted myself into their conversation.”

“That couldn’t have been because you basically got yourself run over by a horse drawn carriage and then nearly shot?”

Matt shakes his head, slow and thoughtful, like he doesn’t even realize the jibe is there. Which is odd for Matthew. Shiro stalks back towards the couch, halfway towards honestly alarmed. He thinks about looming—Matt gets sarcastic about Shiro looming over him—but he doubts even that will get Matt’s attention as his mind wanders down whatever dark paths it has decided to take him. 

“Lance has been killed.”

It takes Shiro a moment to understand those words, that sentence, and when he does the weight of them crushes him onto the settee next to Matt. He collapses inelegantly like a puppet whose strings have been roughly cut. 

“What?” Shiro barely recognizes his own voice, as rough as it sounds. “How?”

“Shot down in the street like a dog and left like one.”

The sudden shift in conversation, the bleakness of Matt’s voice, leaves Shiro grasping at the topic like it’ll suddenly change, become less horrifying, if he could just get his bearings about himself. “But he was a poet.”

He sounds plaintive, even to himself, like a little boy asking that the sad ending of the story isn’t true. Asking to be told a lie. He should know better. Matt never lies. The heavy, almost menacing waltz of the Hapsburg Monarchy fills the air and it’s slow, somber notes fill Shiro with an awful dread. Shiro tilts his head to listen as Matt plays out the pain surely twisting his heart. He always did love too easily.

“I never would have taken him for a rebel,” Shiro says softly. He didn’t know the young man very well, only has scattered memories of bright smile and a sly sense of humor, but he did remember the Matt had fairly _glowed_ after coming back from Budapest. Filled with a light, nearly buoyant _joie de vivre_ that rarely seems to take Matt, even in the middle of his most invigorating cases. Shiro feels the loss like a knife wound to the solar plexus. Something that leaves him short of breath and bleeding slowly. 

Matt laughs, a brittle thing, and pauses in his slow rendition of Tchaikovsky’s recent violin concerto—when and where Matthew had learned the Russian composer’s work, the man a near unknown to London society, Shiro does not know—to consider this statement. “He loved his city.”

It sounds as if Matt is quoting so Shiro can only guess the words come from Allura herself. He can only imagine how devastated with grief she must be. 

“Allura must be wild with grief,” he says and feels inane as soon as the words leave his mouth.

Matt laughs again and Shiro hates the sharp, vicious sound. “Would we even recognize what that looks like?” He wonders as he places his bow back against the strings. He draws out a slow, tortured sound from the instrument that Shiro instinctively loathes. “What indeed would one Allura Altea, sharpest mind of her generation, be willing to do in the depths of grief?”

A chill walks up Shiro’s spine. “You think this is linked?”

Matt shrugs, diffident and utterly affected, “who can guess at a mind as subtle as Allura Altea’s? Not me.”

“You literally keep a file of her exploits,” Shiro notes. “In case the police call upon you to track her down.”

Shiro’s quoting and from the way Matt colours—a delicate pink reaching all the way up to the tops of his earl—he remembers. “Well.” Matt fidgets with his bow for a moment. “Well. Someone ought to.” He doesn’t look at Shiro, instead starts to tune the battered fiddle. As if that will hide his flustered look. “Just in case.”

Shiro snorts. Loudly.

Matt lays the fiddle back in its case with a reverence Shiro’s not seen him take with mere objects.

“Regardless,” Matt says with the air of a man who has reached the end of a conversational path and has no intention of proceeding any further. “Grieved or not, Allura is still intimidated.”

“Which is no mean feat,” Shiro says by way of agreement, obligingly allowing Matt to change the topic. He knows when he’s trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. “But she’s still working for Rabe.”

Matt hums thoughtfully, mind already a million miles away.

Shiro has a sudden premonition. An unpleasant one. “Perhaps you shouldn’t take this case.”

Matt startles. Blinks. And then gives him a terrible, sly smile. “But, as you so thoughtfully pointed out earlier, I will need cover rent on my own shortly.”

 _Ugh_. 

“Ugh,” Shiro says eloquently. “You know it’s not like that.”

Matt waves his fiddle bow dangerously close to Shiro’s left eye. “It is _entirely_ like that. One does not go into one’s marital home accompanied, Shirogane.” Matt pauses to consider his words as Shiro lets one eyebrow climb towards his hairline. “I didn’t mean for it come out quite like that.”

“Of course not.”

“I would never insinuate such a thing.”

“Very improper.”

They are saved from inanity by a knock at the door and harried young constable rushing into the apartment without a by your leave or greeting. He fumbles his helmet into the crook of his elbow and then bows low, a surprisingly graceful gesture despite his obvious nerves.

“Curtis!” Matt chirps, because of course he would know the name of every young, earnest constable in the employ of the Yard.

“Sir. Sirs,” Curtis stutters. “It’s Inspector Smythe. He requests that you come to the Yard at once.” 

Matt snorts. “And what’s he done? Lost the keys to the place.”

Shiro rolls his eyes even as the young constable huffs out an obliging laugh. He does not, Shiro notices, relax even a millimeter. 

“Ah, no sir,” Curtis says, nervousness translating into a tightening of his hand around his helmet until his knuckles go a dangerous white even under the deep golden tan of his skin. “It’s the, uh, the girl? Creature? You found. It’s gone missing.” He grimaces at them in a positively sheepish manner. “It looks like she … got up and walked away.”

Matt sits forward, fingers steepling with his fiddle bow balanced on top of them. “Most engaging.”

Shiro slouches further down his seat and rubs at his eyes. He can feel the onset of a migraine barreling down upon him like the Orient Express down the tracks. Of course it did. Of bloody course, it did.

“Very clever,” he bites out. Curtis cringes and Shiro tries to moderate his tone. “I examined her myself. She, _they_ were dead. Quite. Quite dead.”

Curtis shifts nervously from foot to foot.

“Right,” Matt says in a brisk, no-nonsense tone that snaps the constable’s attention straight back to himself. “What are the facts.”

“Night watchman said he saw the girl walk out of the morgue himself.”

Matt makes a little ‘continue’ gesture with his fiddle bow.

“He went to investigate. Found the room full of water, like someone had dumped an entire bathtub across the floor. Girl’s footprints led outside and then just,” the constable makes a gesture with one hand, “vanished.”

Shiro leans over and pats Matt’s knee. “I’ll leave this in your capable hands,” he says as he stands to fetch his coat. “I have an appointment with Keith and his mother for tea. I can’t be late, you understand.”

Matt watches him from the corner of his eyes. “It’s not my reputation that’s at stake here.”

“Don’t try that,” Shiro sighs. He points one finger at Matt without any sort of hope that Matt will actually pay attention. “I won’t be manipulated like that.”

Matt shrugs one slender shoulder. “Has the press gotten wind of it?”

The constable shoots a look between the two of them and then, remarkably, manages to fidget harder. “No, we’re trying to avoid that. Clearly.”

“Clearly,” Matt echoes. “What’s the major concern?”

“Panic, sir,” Curtis says. “What with the reprinting of Shelley’s little horror story. Sheer, bloody panic.”

“Of course,” Matt murmurs. He has a distant, thoughtful look in his eyes.

“You aren’t taking this seriously, are you?” Shiro demands. “She's not come back from the _dead_. It's just," Shiro waves his hand in frustration, "grave robbery. Like our lovely country doesn't have enough of a history with that. Someone has just stolen the corpse. _Evidence_.”

Matt tilts his head with that horrible, beautiful smile on his lips like Shiro’s answered a question he hasn’t even asked. “Indeed.”

* * *

Shiro finds himself in the middle of the Yard’s morgue, a half inch of water sloshed all over the floors, not but half an hour later. He wishes he knew how he got himself into situations like this, but the answer, unfortunately, stands next to him with an amused little smile on his face as he surveys the mess. 

“Most engaging.”

Shiro is going to kill him.


End file.
